Voting difficulties in Florida have reached a point in which parody is no longer possible. Palm Beach in particular, home to the infamous “butterfly ballot,” apparently wants to be the subject of ridicule.
It started two weeks ago, when voters received absentee ballots with outdated instructions telling them their signatures must be witnessed or their votes won’t count. Naturally, this information is wrong.
It got worse last week, when people started noticing that the absentee ballots use a method that voters once again find confusing.
Palm Beach County has introduced an absentee ballot that requires voters to indicate their choices by connecting broken arrows, sparking criticism that it is even more confusing than the infamous “butterfly ballot” used in the 2000 election.
Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who approved the 2000 butterfly ballot, opted for a ballot design for the Aug. 31 primary that asks voters to draw lines joining two ends of an arrow.
This isn’t going over well.
Jim Kemp shuddered when he saw Palm Beach County’s absentee ballot.
“People aren’t going to understand this,” he said of the ballot, which instructs people to connect an arrow to vote for the candidate of their choice.
“It’s just going to be a mess again.”
It’s an election in Florida; why would anyone expect anything less than a mess?
The ballot used in the primaries will be used again for the general election. Here’s what it looked like earlier this year:
This ballot was rejected by the optical scanner because of the extra arrow, which the voter probably added to be extra clear about his or her choice.
Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore said she chose the “connect the arrows” method because tests showed it was easier for voters. But it was clearly ineffective earlier this year.
Despite instructions that clearly explain how to connect arrows so their votes will be counted, warnings to vote for only one candidate and admonitions not to erase, at least 150 Palm Beach County voters managed to mess up their absentee ballots in the March presidential primary.
They voted for two candidates. They used Wite-Out. They erased. They drew lines, circles, squares and check marks. They scrawled “Yes” or “No” in margins to indicate their choice.
Others, who otherwise followed instructions, had other distractions. They spilled food or drink on their ballots. Or, in an apparent attempt to secure the envelope, smeared their ballot with glue.
The sugarcoated, ink-covered and glue-spattered ballots, along with others that couldn’t be read by the elections office’s optical scanners, ended up in the reject pile.
Florida is poised for another debacle. What’s truly sad is that no one will be surprised.