The primary election ballot provided by King County was poorly designed and the little wobbly voting stations inadequate. The stations are so small that they provide little privacy, and they wiggle so badly that I have trouble filling in the ovals on the optical ballots. This time, as I was trying to fill out the ballot, the light on the first station I tried kept blinking on and off. This is a wealthy county, which could easily afford decent voting stations.
The lousy voting stations were annoying; the bad ballot design could affect the results of the election. Because of court decisions, Washington state was forced to give up its popular blanket primary. As a result, the ballot actually covered three separate elections, the Democratic primary, the Republican primary, and the nonpartisan races. There is, I think, an obvious way to design a single ballot to cover all three. You put the party choice at the very top, in the middle, by itself. You then put the Democratic primary choices in one column and the Republican primary choices in a separate column. And you separate the three with strong visual clues. The nonpartisan races go on the back.
Instead, whoever designed the ballot put the party choice in the left hand column, just above the Democratic party choices. The Democratic choices extended into the right hand column; the Republican choices extended on to the back of the ballot. This was needlessly confusing. (Though they did color code the two parties, using, as is now common, blue for Democrats and red for Republicans.) And, unfortunately, these kinds of design mistakes are what I have come to expect from King County.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(I said as usual because this was exactly the same experience that I have had in previous elections, for instance, in 2002 and in 2004.)
Posted by Jim Miller at September 19, 2006 01:20 PM | Email ThisI live in a fairly populous area of the county, yet poll workers outnumbered the voters 4-2.
But just think how much weight our votes had. It's like voting for 100 people or more!
Posted by: Shaun on September 19, 2006 02:13 PMThe voting booths are the same as the ones in any other county anywhere in the country. There's only a couple of companies that make them, and the design offered by both is essentially the same. If yours seemed uncommonly unstable, you might point out to the pollworker that perhaps the legs are not screwed in all the way and move to another booth.
If there is an issue with the lightbulb (and lightbulbs do burn out in polling booths as well as in sockets throughout America), again, mention it to the pollworker, and they can call a troubleshooter to bring them a new bulb, usually within a half hour.
Tha ballot design itself both for this year's partisan primary and the one in 2004 is quite bad for King County, I would agree, however, the complaints you had in 2002 (which you referenced and linked back to), such as the order the candidates appeared in and where the party designation was, were mandated by state law at the time.
Posted by: Insider on September 19, 2006 02:46 PMThe inability to distinguish red from blue is rare among the types of colorblindness. Furthermore, from my memory of the ballot, the color only served as a help to people. One didn't need to sense the color to understand the ballot.
That said, it's still a horribly designed ballot. I like to think I'm a reasonably smart guy and I had to scan the ballot very slowly and deliberately to make sure I wasn't screwing up.
Posted by: Scott on September 19, 2006 04:16 PMThe people who are too ignorant or lazy to follow the simple instructions, definitely should not have any say over electing those who will direct our city, county, state and country.
Democracy is a bad form of government. We don't live in a democracy.
Posted by: Jeff B. on September 19, 2006 04:29 PM