November 25, 2000

1:14 PM

Why have I never seen this before today?It turns out that the funniest mockery of the Florida ballot comes from BET; I find this much better than the oft-emailed wiggly-line ballot.
posted by delfuego (8 comments total)

Quite a laugh. Thanks.
posted by Hjorth at 1:53 PM on November 25, 2000

We had an actual Palm Beach voting booth with a butterfly ballot brought to the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel newsroom. What we found was that the angle that the ballot was displayed, in conjuction with the poor design, led to the confusion. We did a flash graphic of our own that is drawn from the same angle a 5' 10" voter would see.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/graphics/news/ballot.htm
posted by stevis at 1:58 PM on November 25, 2000

I clicked the "talk about this" link, and the page that started loading threw an interesting message at the bottom left of my IE window:

34k of 1.5 meg loaded...

That's a little too big, BET.
posted by jragon at 2:53 PM on November 25, 2000

The guy who did the squiggly-line ballot was featured in this article in the Washington Post today. It's about the spread of memes on the web.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 5:19 PM on November 25, 2000

It even gets better when your hand can shift the page slightly up and down. At least that was the case with with the butteryfly ballot in Cook County.
posted by skallas at 7:27 PM on November 25, 2000

...only if your hand is up by the pegs that hold the ballot (somewhat) in place. The butterfly ballot was annoying and confusing.

You can't jiggle a Flash animation.
posted by hijinx at 10:45 PM on November 25, 2000

For who (whom?) is 5'10" average height? That's useful to demonstrate the angle at which some men might have seen the ballot, but the average woman in the US is a good three to four inches shorter, and by that estimation must've seen the ballot differently, as would your average shorter and/or hunched over senior citizen.

Any way you slice it, it's still follow the big bold black arrow to the hole 1/4" inch away.
posted by Dreama at 12:21 AM on November 26, 2000

I wish someone would inspect the tabletops these ballots were placed upon. What if you accidently set the punchcard a little off before you put the booklet over it? Is this system intended to purposefully insure idiots can't vote, or just that idiots would accidently vote wrong in order to favor yet another idiot?

Was I the only one who noticed Bush blinking irregularly during his 'acceptance speech' tonight? Eerie. At least, unlike Forbes, this idiot actually blinks.
posted by ZachsMind at 9:34 PM on November 26, 2000