The consequences of bad typography: a historic example

If you think the potential consequences of bad typography are merely aesthetic—think again.

This is the famous “butterfly ballot” from Palm Beach County that was used in the 2000 presidential election. For all the attention focused on hanging chads and the intervention of the Supreme Court, I would argue that the root problem was this ballot’s terrible typography.

And by terrible, I don’t mean ugly or illegible—I mean it didn’t work. A ballot has only one job: to record a voter’s preferences. This ballot failed. Voters who wanted Al Gore could read their candidate’s name. But many of them didn’t understand which hole to punch, because the punch holes were arranged in one pattern (one vertical column) and the candidates in a different pattern (a two-column zigzag across the middle). The boxes surrounding the candidate names each spanned more than one punch hole. If your eyesight was less than perfect, those little arrows were likely to appear as indistinct blobs. (According to the 2000 census, about 23% of Palm Beach County residents were over 65.)

Consider this redesign of the ballot, proposed by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler in their book Universal Principles of Design:

Here, the names of the candidates are organized into a single vertical column, the same way as the punch holes, and no candidate’s name spans more than one hole. While this design would not have eliminated all voter error, it would’ve had a far better chance of being correctly understood. Unlike the butterfly ballot, this ballot does not invite ambiguous readings.

The moral of the story: don’t spend all your effort on research, writing and editing and then turn your work into a butterfly ballot.

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