Of the 23% of citizens who cast invalid ballots, what number do you think did so intentionally?
Speaking from IRL experience 23% of ballots being invalid is a shockingly high amount, and likely indicates that the process has something wrong with it.
Every election has folks who invalidate their ballots by voting IRV instead of approval. We had a discussion on changing the voting system so it would be the same way to vote either way. That went nowhere.
I could not say for sure. If it helps, this is the breakdown of nature of the invalid ballots:
- Voting before the start of voting: 1 vote
- Voting IRV in an approval election: 6 votes
- Approving a candidate and Re-Open Nominations: 1 vote
My guess is those 5 people did not read the instructions and somehow still don’t realise that this is an approval election.
In fairness the relatively low number of votes does skew the percentage. 23% of 35 votes is less significant than 23% of millions of votes.
As someone who accidentally cast an invalid ballot for the delegate (realizing it was invalid immediately after I cast it), I think something that could help prevent IRV votes for an approval election would be different formats for the vote templates. When I cast my invalid delegate ballot I had just voted in the PM election already, and instinctively repeated what I did for that ballot. If we were to do a simple change to one of the ballots to make IRV and approval votes look distinct from one another and require slightly different ways of filling it out (say bolding the chosen candidate’s name for an example) it would probably prevent most of the accidental IRV votes.
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There’s a huge red text that tells you to read the voting instructions. If people don’t do that then that’s on them.
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I’m sorry Kris, but saying “It’s the voters” fault is not acceptable. I work in this area IRL (as you know) and if nearly a quarter of the voters at a General Election failed to cast their ballots correctly there would be a parliamentary enquiry, the Electoral Commissioners and their senior staff would lose their jobs, and god knows what other consequences.
This keeps happening at elections you oversee, you need to either come up with a plan to fix the problem or the Assembly will have to step in.
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Frankly, I’m not sure how much clearer Kris can make it… it’s very clear to those that take even an extra second to read it. He even put example pictures in there!
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I have no idea what exactly it is that you expect me to do considering the lengths to which I have gone to simplify the voting process:
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The voting booth has a warning in large, red letters that informs people of the voting system and the issues that will result in their vote being invalid.
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There is a step-by-step description of how to cast a vote.
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There are images that show examples of how each step in the process looks like.
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There is a button that automatically opens a ballot already pre-directed to the Election Commission.
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There is a pre-made template that lists all candidates, so people won’t accidentally mistype their names.
If you have any ideas on what can be done then by all means make the suggestion, but there also has to come a point where people take responsibility for their failure to take advantage of the tools available at their disposal.
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As someone who is new and just came in last month, and As someone who also accidentally cast an invalid ballot, I am deeply concerned about the 23% in valid ballot percentage, I think like me and the other people probably didn’t and I apologize on that part, but the 23% of people probably most of them including me, most likely ranked them, and most likely assumed it was the same as the Prime Minister voting method, From this I am deeply concerned about the effect ability of the Election Commissioner and his job, I can’t really think of other ways to help solve this, however, their should be a united format of voting, where it’s the same for every single election, and for every position we have, that has elections. But that is a discussion for another time.
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I think there are likely two main problems causing people to vote IRV in an approval vote. The first is people vote for PM, read all the stuff there, and then don’t read the delegate instructions because they look the same at a glance. The two different sets of red instruction text look like they’re the same if you don’t actually stop to look at them, and people who have already read the PM one are not unlikely to assume they’re the same if they don’t stop. The second reason, the reason why I accidentally cast an invalid vote, is because I know how to vote, I’ve done it before, and since nothing has changed with the voting process I didn’t feel the need to reread stuff I already knew. I will admit, this is my fault and had I read that information I would have been reminded that the delegate is an approval vote and I wouldn’t have cast an invalid vote.
I had an idea in my previous post on how to prevent this in the future. If we make the ballots for the delegate formatted different than the PM ballot so that you show approval in a different way than typing out a single character per candidate (like you do in IRV) then that will prevent people from defaulting to IRV. Examples of this could be putting [ ] around your chosen candidate, bolding the name of your chosen candidate, copy/pasting the name of the candidate to a labeled spot, or simply deleting the names of all others. The most important part of all of these would be to move away from the current template format for delegate ballots. By moving away from the current template format for approval voting people won’t be able to mindlessly use IRV if we remove the number input area. New people who just voted for PM won’t be able to just copy what they did for it and would have to (hopefully) go back and actually read the instructions, and the different voting template should be a helpful reminder that its an approval vote.
Another idea could be to have that if someone ranks candidates in an approval vote then their first place rank is taken as who they approve. It’s simple, it won’t stop people from not reading the instructions, but it will stop the problem.
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On a totally different note, when is the Election Commission organizing the second round vote?
I think part of the problem is that the way you are adjudicating the ballots is too strict - a principle of the UK Electoral Commission is to minimise the number of spoilt ballots, and that means where the voting intention can be clearly identified it is included.
Their guidance and booklet on dealing with doubtful ballot papers may be of help here - example sixteen on page 26 would potentially have resolved most of the ballots you rejected.
I’m aware of the way countries like the UK and the US consider voter intent. I fundamentally disagree with the notion that elections officials should impart subjective judgement on what constitutes a valid or invalid vote beyond confronting it with clearly established guidelines.
In which case I request anonymised release of the relevant ballots to allow independent assessment, to determine how easily intent can be identified and the reasonableness of your declared position.
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Unless you or someone else knows how to download dozens of ballots in one go, I am not really interested in taking the time to do that.
It involves taking eight screenshots and cropping the image down to only the ballot can be seen. It’s not complicated.
They’re ballots where voters ranked Griffindor and RON. There isn’t much to them.
