Most balloting seems pretty straight-forward. The voter is asked to blacken a circle or draw a line through a box with a special felt tip pen. Maybe it's a butterfly ballot, and the voter is to use a stylus to punch a hole through the ballot to mark various choices. Levers. Touch screens. All in all, this shouldn't be brain surgery.
As ballots continue to be counted in the Coleman versus Franken senatorial race in Minnesota, the electorate is once again proving that if given instructions, a certain number of people will ignore them. The scanner doesn't recognize -- and thus doesn't count -- improperly marked ballots. This should have counted for McCain-Palin, and ultimately did after a hand count I presume.
I spent a good chunk of time this weekend coding surveys I fielded for a graduate school research project. The instructions, which were read aloud in each undergraduate class that was part of the survey, were pretty damn simple. For nearly all the questions, a Likert scale was used. You've seen these before...
In this section, there are a series of statements with which you may (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neither disagree nor agree, (4) agree, or (5) strongly agree. Please respond to each of these items by indicating your level of disagreement or agreement by circling the appropriate number. There is no right or wrong answer.
The scale is played out thusly...
disagree 1 2 3 4 5 agree
Apparently, this was still pretty confusing to some of the college students who responded. Several respondents just circled the words disagree or agree. (I coded those as either a 1 or 5. Others were indecisive, and circled a pair of numbers, trying to split between a 2 and a 3 for example. I coded that based on which ever number seemed more emphasized. Judgment call.) Another section asked multiple choice questions, some of which were returned with multiple answers.
Don't get me wrong; I am not looking to make fun of my respondents. They were all doing me a favor by helping me with this survey. Rather, I guess this got me to realize that people just don't always follow instructions, even when they are read aloud or clearly written with diagrams andpictures and readily available assistance. It's just the way it goes. What should be easy, and appears easy to most of us, isn't so simple. People fuck things up... even smart people. Seeing this in my own survey gives me a new appreciation for the occasional need for a painstakingly accurate recount in close elections. But, honestly, didn't we all learn basic coloring skills in kindergarten? "Stay within the lines" and all that? Maybe those who choose to mark ballots in non-standard ways are simply expressing their creative side. Kind of a Montessori thing.
All of that said, I do have to wonder if the people who recount ballots ever see rationalization for the way a voter voted. This occurs to me because on several of the surveys I reviewed for my project, there were little notes in the margins explaining why certain answers were chosen. My survey dealt with computer self-efficacy, and how people used social networks and music download sites and stuff like that. I came across comments like "I hateiTunes," "only an idiot would buy a CD," and "I used to download music until my I dropped my laptop." And what's with little smiley faces next to some answers? There is no extra credit on surveys... or on ballots. Only answers that can't be counted.
Are the ballot police in Minnesota finding stuff like "Coleman is a shithead" or "I hate Stuart Smalley"? I have to wonder.
[cross-posted on Kerfuffle]