Thursday, November 19, 2000 DESIGN NOTEBOOK The butterfly ballot flap reminds us of that famous phrase butterfly effect By PHIL PATTON The butterfly ballot flap reminds us of that famous phrase butterfly effect. In 1961 mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz, one of the pioneers of chaos theory, coined the famous phrase butterfly effect. The work of weather, he argued, can ultimately magnify the flapping of a butterfly’s wings into a typhoon. The phrase has become shorthand for the way tiny factors working through complex systems can work huge changes in history-- a modern equivalent of the lost horse shoe nail that dooms a kingdom. Now, we can speak of butterfly ballot effect: small flaws in design magnified into national crisis. The whole storm of the Florida election controversy spun like a hurricane around the eye of the Palm Beach ballots everyone knew were wrong, the Buchanan instead of Gore ballots that not even the boldest judge dared interfere with. The happiest potential butterfly effect of the butterfly ballot would be not just a redesign of voting systems, but a recognition of how important their design is—and how vital technology is to our democracy. The punch card has long been a symbol of the way the individual can be submerged into the mass and the resentment of individuals to the power of large organizations. "Do not fold spindle or mutilate," the legend printed on IBM cards was turned in the Sixties into a T-shirt slogan: "Do not fold spindle or mutilate—I am a human being." (Spindling, incidentally, referred to sticking a card on an old fashioned spike like device for collecting receipts, messages etc. It would put a random hole in the card.) The card became a symbol of the way a person can literally get lost in the shuffle—the shuffle of cards or ballots in the machine. Design Notebook NY Times Thursday, November 19, 2000: America knows them by now: the clinging chad, the pregnant chad, the trapdoor chad. These tiny defects in the punch card ballot system have focused national attention on the design of voting technology. Whatever the final disposition of the court cases, the ballot flap has already had powerful effects, drawing our attention to illegible ballots, spoiled ballots, and the antiquated nature of our voting technology. The Florida controversy may mark the first time that bad design has been specifically charged with damaging the constitutional rights of Americans. Confusion about the Palm Beach ballot was evident at the polls and the ballot has been accused of violating a legal design parameter. Florida statutes require that the printed ballot allow for a vote mark to the right of the candidate's name and that the machine version of the ballot "shall as nearly as practicable conform to the arrangement of the paper ballot." Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach county supervisor of elections, a Democrat, has said that she ordered the type on the ballot enlarged to make it easier for older people to read. The unintended consequence was to force some of the names into a second column, to the right of the punch holes. This meant that while the punch holes for some names were to the right, others were to the left. The inconsistency of the layout presents a basic problem, said Sylvia Harris, a graphic designer who helped design the 2000 census form and now teaches at Yale. "The check box can be to either the right or left, but it has to be consistent," she said. "The holes are disembodied from the names. And you never cross the gutter" - where the punch holes are. "It's counterintuitive and counter conventional," she added. Alex Isley, another graphic designer, found himself more bemused than appalled by the Palm Beach County ballot. "My first reaction was, 'What's all the fuss about?,' " he said. "It seemed harder to get it wrong than to get it right. It didn't seem they needed a professional graphic designer so much as common sense. Why didn't they just space the names out, for instance?" But part of the problem lies with the punch card voting system used in Palm Beach County and by a third of the country, a lingering, century- old technology long since abandoned by business and most other branches of government -the hanging chad of technology. The punch card system is also a reminder of how closely our democracy has been linked to technology and its design. The punch card system was invented specifically to carry out the constitutional requirement that we hold a census each decade. The census, of course, is used to allocate members of the House of Representatives. By the 1880's, toting up census results had become a task surpassing human ability. When the founding fathers framed the consitution, there were about five million Americans; by 1880 there were ten times as many. Compiling the results of that year's census by hand took seven years. Herman Hollerith, a former employee of the Census Bureau, developed the punch card system in order to total the results of the 1890 census. Although the population had increased to about 60 million, Hollerith's machines finished the 1890 survey in just six weeks and saved the government $5 million. Hollerith based his invention, in part, on Jacquard looms, which were driven by similar cars. His other inspiration was railroad tickets (called "punch photographs") conductors punched with information about passengers. (These registered hair and eye color and other information to prevent passengers from swapping tickets or otherwise cheating the railroad.) Hollerith called the census a "national punch photograph." He made the cards the same size as the dollar bill in order to use existing storage files and other equipment used in banks. Soon businesses from railroads to department stores adopted Hollerith punch cards to track customers and cargoes. In the 1890's, voting machines also began to use the technology. Praised as part of the good government efforts of the time they soon became common. The evolution of mechanical tabulating systems based on punch cards led to the IBM Corporation. Without punch cards, the Social Security system would have been impossible to implement in the 1930's. Each citizen was recorded on a card. When the first modern toll superhighway was completed in 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike IBM punch cards proved the only practical means for regulating tolls according to distances from exit to exit. The first way to fill out the Hollerith punch cards was by a hand punch, a device that looked like one of today's credit card sliders. By the 1950's, typewriters translated English into the language of the cards. Punch cards were of course the first mode of programming digital computers. (A new show "On the Job: Design and the American Office," opening on Saturday at the National Building Museum in Washington, traces the impact of the punch card system.) Punch cards were always the source of potential computer error. The term "chad" arose in the late 1940's in the labs of newfangled digital computers to refer to punched out bits of paper. Sometimes errant punches only bulged. This socalled "pregnant chad" made William Delahunt a Congressman from Massachusetts in 1996. After 20 percent of the ballots in a primary election apparently turned out blank, a judge ruled that Mr. Delahunt's votes were underrecorded due to mechanical problems that left bulges but not holes. (The punch card system in the district was replaced.) From the earliest days of punch card systems, floating bits of chad caused errors. Cards fed into a machine or written out of alignment could set off a chain of mistakes. This "offset effect" between hole and reader was passed on like a bad gene to the magnetic readers, the offspring of punch cards, that are used in grading standardized tests. Students taking standardized tests still live in terror of offsetting the entries on an SAT answer sheet; if one answer is entered in the wrong place, all the rest can be wrong. ATM's can also produce offset error, if the buttons don't exactly match the categories on the screen. And it was offset error, of course - an unclear association between name and matching hole - that caused the alleged confusion for the Palm Beach County voters. Census officials this year introduced an optical system that can read normal handwriting. New technology of this sort would bring immediate improvement to voting, said Ms. Harris, the designer of the census form. But even before voting adopts new hardware, the ballots and labels could be improved. Clarity could be enhanced, Ms. Harris said, not just by enlarging the type but by using a clearer typeface, like the Congress face, a clean sans serif with relatively large lower case letters that Ms. Harris employed in the census form. (It is also used in many yellow page telephone directories.) "And ballots should be tested," Ms. Harris said. "You'll never know whether any ballot or form works until you test it on real people under actual conditions." Charles Costello, director of the democracy program at the Carter Center in Altanta, helps monitor elections around the world. There are no world standards for ballot design, he said, but there are "best practice" standards and guidelines for ballots. Most of the world, Mr. Costello said, still votes with pen and paper. Sometimes animals and colors are used to indicate candidates in countries with low literacy rates. Election commissions around the world, however, might be surprised at how low- tech the American system remains. "Talk to anyone around the world who knows computers," Mr. Costello said, "and they would say, `You mean you still use punch cards?"' The Florida election, Mr. Costello said, has focused attention on the number of spoiled ballots in American elections. "For years,` we've regarded these as an acceptable margin of error," he said. "But technical problems become hugely magnified when the stakes are large and the results close." The happiest butterfly effect would be a recognition of how important even the details of design are to democracy. MORE on BALLOTS: The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES.org) administers a vast online database the Administration and Cost of Elections (ACE) Website - an electronic encyclopedia of election administration developed in conjunction with the United Nations and other international agencies including many sample ballots from around the world. (aceproject.org) The Vodamatic machine is made by the Election Resources Corporation Florida Election Law Details: 2000-Ch0101-Section%20151"101.151 Specifications for general election ballot. 2000-Ch0101-Section%20161"101.161 Referenda; ballots. Note especially: Beneath the caption and preceding the names of candidates shall be the following words: "To vote for a candidate whose name is printed on the ballot, place a cross (X) mark in the blank space at the right of the name of the candidate for whom you desire to vote. To vote for a write-in candidate, write the name of the candidate in the blank space provided for that purpose." The ballot shall have headings under which shall appear the names of the offices and names of duly nominated candidates for the respective offices in the following order: the heading "Electors for President and Vice President" and thereunder the names of the candidates for President and Vice President of the United States nominated by the political party which received the highest vote for Governor in the last general election of the Governor in this state, above which shall appear the name of said party. Then shall appear the names of other candidates for President and Vice President of the United States who have been properly nominated. Votes cast for write-in candidates for President and Vice President shall be counted as votes cast for the presidential electors supporting such candidates. The 2000 Florida Statutes
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