The New York state November 2010 ballot (in counties outside New York city) will look like this.
Note that this is a paper ballot. It could have been arranged so that each party has its own row. Or it could have been arranged to dispense with rows or columns, and instead been printed in an “office group” format, in which all candidates for one particular office are listed together under the title of each office in turn.
However, this paper ballot arbitrarily creates one row for seven parties (Democratic, Republican, Independence, Conservative, Working Families, Green, and Rent is 2 Damn High). Then it squeezes each of the other four parties into dual rows. Therefore, the Libertarian and Freedom Parties share a row, and the Anti-Prohibition and Taxpayer Parties share another row.
There was some justification for such a ballot design when New York used mechanical voting machines. The face of the voting machine only had room for nine rows or nine columns. But there is no justification whatsoever for that ballot format when all ballots are printed pieces of paper.
If the Credico lawsuit wins, then Randy Credico will be featured in the Anti-Prohibition Party row as well as the Libertarian Party row, and voters can choose which line to vote for him on. But the basic bad ballot design will still be a problem.
