A healthy democracy requires that every voter has equal access to an effective vote. Every voter should be able to easily express their preferences and have confidence that every effort has been made to record and count those preferences accurately. But poor ballot design makes it harder for people to vote.
Hundreds of thousands of votes go uncounted every election season because of poorly designed ballots, and numerous studies have found evidence that counties with higher concentrations of Black, Hispanic, low-income, less educated, and/or older voters have higher rates of unrecorded votes due, in part, to bad ballot design.
Adhering to straightforward, science-based ballot design recommendations can effectively lower ballot rejection rates, decrease the number of ballot envelopes that need to be cured or fixed, decrease the time it takes to vote and increase voter turnout.
Ballot design is a crucial yet often overlooked part of election administration in the United States. To ascertain the general usability of ballots across the nation, we collected and evaluated sample ballots from one jurisdiction in each of eight counties in five traditionally electorally competitive and significant states—Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We evaluated the design of these sample ballots using 10 of our equitable ballot design recommendations.
Related resources
Using the FACA Database
The Independent Science Initiative
Independent Science Committees
