The New York city council held an election day survey, and has released its findings. They reveal that New York city voters’ top complaint about administration of the November 2, 2010 election is the confusing ballot design. See here. Thanks to Michael Drucker’s The Independent View for this news.
New York, starting this year, uses paper ballots. Virtually all other states that use paper ballots designs the ballots so that all the candidates running for one particular office are grouped together. But New York designs the paper ballots as though the state were still using mechanical voting machines. When New York used mechanical voting machines, the state used a party column (or party row) format. Because the mechanical voting machines didn’t have enough rows (or columns) for all the parties, the mechanical voting machines would generally put two parties into the same column.
Now that New York has given up mechanical voting machines, there is no rational reason to maintain that old format, but New York’s paper general election ballots this year mindlessly kept that old format. The only unqualified party this year that had its own separate column was the Green Party. And, the only unqualified party this year that definitely polled enough votes to become qualified is the Green Party.
A rational system would mean that each voter would receive more than one ballot card. There is nothing inherently wrong with giving each voter more than a single card to vote on. If two or even three cards were permitted, then tiny print would not need to be so tiny, and all the candidates and parties could be treated equally. Of course not every candidate or party can have the top line on the ballot, but at least the ballot could be arranged to avoid gross discrimination.