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An electoral butterfly effect

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Abstract

Part of the controversy surrounding this year's presidential election in the United States concerns the potential for systematic bias in the ballot-card format — could the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, have led to confusion and caused people who had intended to vote for Al Gore to vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake? Here we show that not only is the double-column butterfly ballot more confusing than a single-column ballot, but that it also appears to cause systematic errors in voting which call into question the validity of the results from Palm Beach County in the 2000 United States presidential election.

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Figure 1: The arrangement of candidates on the butterfly ballot in a mock election for the Canadian prime minister.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, P-343 BioSci, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2E9, Alberta, Canada

    Robert C. Sinclair, Sean E. Moore, Carrie A. Lavis & Alexander S. Soldat

  2. Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, Moore Building, University Park, Pennsylvania , 16802, USA

    Melvin M. Mark

Authors
  1. Robert C. Sinclair
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  2. Melvin M. Mark
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  3. Sean E. Moore
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  4. Carrie A. Lavis
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  5. Alexander S. Soldat
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Correspondence to Robert C. Sinclair.

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Sinclair, R., Mark, M., Moore, S. et al. An electoral butterfly effect. Nature 408, 665–666 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35047160

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