Robert Sinclair of the University of Alberta, Canada, and his colleagues report this week that some Canadian shoppers using a ballot card with the same layout as the one that may have caused Pat Buchanan to get votes intended for Al Gore made the same mistake in a mock election for a Canadian prime minister.
Sinclair's team placed the names of the two leading Canadian candidates (Day and Chretien) in the first and second positions of the left-hand column of the butterfly paper. The paper lists candidates down both sides of a central spine, on which the voting mark must be made.
These two positions correspond to those of 'Bush' and 'Gore' on the Palm Beach paper. The team put a third Canadian, Clark, at the top of the right-hand column, exactly where Pat Buchanan's name appeared in Florida. Shoppers were asked to vote for one of a total of ten people named on the paper, and then to confirm for whom they had intended to vote.
Almost eight per cent of people using the butterfly ballot in the trial made mistakes -- most inadvertently voting for Clark when they believed they were choosing Chretien. Many more said that the card was confusing. A second set of shoppers, who voted on an alternative card with the candidate names listed in a single column, made no mistakes. The team reports its results in
"It's a small-scale trial but to me the really interesting bit is that they have generated real errors," says Steve Blinkhorn, an applied psychologist and expert on psychometric testing at Psychometric Research and Development, a consultancy organization in St Albans, UK. "Although the number of errors is fairly small it is statistically significant, and just a few mistakes in every hundred will add up to an enormous overall effect," he adds.
"I've come across problems with automated reading machines before," he goes on. "If you don't design your information-collection device with people in mind then you will definitely produce errors. In the case of Palm Beach, it seems that someone has devised a system with great deference to technology counting the votes but scant regard to the voters."
Melvin Mark, an American psychologist at Pennsylvania State University and one of the report's authors (and a Democrat), says that, although he believes that the study could be "legally relevant", he does not know whether it will help Al Gore claw back crucial votes. "It seems that the butterfly ballot was last week's issue and everyone is now focusing on hanging chads and the like." A chad is the tiny piece of paper punched out of a ballot when a vote is cast.
Thankfully there is no need to recount the Canadian results. The team asked its voters to mark their choice with a pen, not creating a chad -- hanging, pregnant or otherwise. Incidentally, the result of the real Canadian election held on November 27 was known within 24 hours: Chretien and the liberals retained power.