When you superimpose the two first pages of the ballot, it's clear that the area

people looked at to cast their vote for senator was almost the same as the area
they looked at to cast their vote for governor.
If the first page had contained two choices, people would probably have looked m
ore carefully around the second page. But now, 13% looked only at the main part
of the page and ignored the small bit at the top.
In fact, it's surprising that only 13% of voters ignored the House election. Ban
ner blindness usually impacts many more people. But of course this was not a Web
page, and the "banner" was textual and not a flashing graphic.
The New York Times quoted a Sarasota resident for being "insulted" by the implic
ation that they are "too stupid to know how to vote." Of course, as with any usa
bility problem, the issue is not stupid users. The problem is that the designer
was stupid and violated two well-known usability principles.
In fact, tech-savvy voters are more likely to be hit by banner blindness than pe
ople who never use the Internet. Less-skilled users would likely move slowly and
hesitantly through the screens and would thus be more likely to spot the area a
t the top of the second page. So clever voters (or at least computer-using voter
s) were more likely to have this problem than stupid voters.
A third usability issue impacted the outcome as well: the fact that users had to
make their way through 21 screens to cast the full ballot. By the end of such a
long interaction sequence, people can't remember what they did in the beginning
. This is why people didn't notice that they had not voted for the House.
Also, having to work your way through 21 pages (as nicely indicated by appropria
te use of a progress indicator of the bottom of the screen) means that you are l
ikely to rush through each page a bit faster than maybe you ought to.
Sadly, long ballots with many choices are an issue beyond the power of the inter
action designer. But the bigger the ballot, the more the reason to design its co
mponents for optimal usability.
There are plenty of other usability problems with these screen designs. For exam
ple, the checkboxes are too far away from the names of the candidates. Also, the
re is no reason to abbreviate the party names and write them in ALL CAPS. Finall
y, of course, the visual design leaves much to be desired -- software shouldn't
look like DOS these days. (See our two-day course on usability guidelines for ap
plication design for more about these types of issues.)
Florida also had a usability problem that impacted a major election in 2000: the
infamous " butterfly ballot ."
You would imagine that Florida would recognize by now the need for usability whe
n designing these walk-up-and-use user interfaces. But no. The 8-person committe
e of academics the Secretary of State hired to investigate the 2006 ballot didn'
t contain a single expert on human-computer interaction.
This committee went to great depth investigating the possibility of voting fraud
and software manipulation. But there's no reason to suspect something this comp
licated when a simple explanation is readily available to anybody who understand
s human behavior in interactive systems.