It's rather obvious that some people here are highly qualified for a position in a Microsoft interface design group, for they obviously don't have a clue about interface design!

A ballot is an interface between the voter and the candidates. It is NOT an IQ test of any kind. When you know you are being tested, your mind works in a very different way than when you are voting. And those kids certainly knew they were NOT voting, even if they weren't explicitly told that they were being tested.

The fact is, good interfaces must be as "invisible" as possible. It must take in account 1) the task at hand and 2) how the human mind works (among other things). The ballot in question is a horrible interface. If I'm not mistaken, people who have english as their native tongue read from left to right. Also, if there are more than one column of text, they tend to read the left column first, and only them proceed to the other ones. If the columns are of approximately the same size, they tend to suppose that the text in both columns is aligned. The ballot in question failed to notice all of this. Also, it failed to notice that for the vast majority of american voters (again, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not american myself) the choice was between just two candidates - and they were put in the first and second place of the first column in the ballot.

The obvious thing to do, at least when one considers how our brain is used to work when it comes to english text, was to find your candidate (let's say it was Gore), notice it's position in the column (in this case, second), look from left to right in the line where his name is, and find the second marker position.

Of course, if one was to examine the ballot itself with just a little care (as one would do in an IQ test, for instance), it would become clear that there was another column, and that one would have to consider the NON obvious right to left movement of the eye to take into account the position for candidates in the right column. 

Now, the fact is, people were NOT going out to analyse the ballots on that tuesday - they were going out to VOTE. To put it in other words, they were not there to look at the interface, but to USE it.

Does someone in here has to occasionally use different computer operational systems? Like, for instance, the MacOS and Windows? There are small differences in how you do things in these different interfaces, and often when I want to do the same task I'm used to do in my Mac, when I'm at a windows platform, I make some mistake. Of course, I quickly notice that I made a mistake, because there is some sort of response from the system telling me that. That's yet another flaw in the ballot "interface": it does not gives you any kind of feedback regarding your action.

All these flaws are not obvious. They are not that hard to find, sure, but one needs to know what is a "good" and a "bad" interface to do it, and also it's useful to know what are the consequences of a "bad" interface. Now this I believe everyone knows by now: when an interface is bad, users will make errors. And it is simply stupid to assume that the thousands of persons who made mistakes are dumb or something like that. They're not. When you have a flawed interface (in this case a VERY flawed interface) and a big enough number of users, them the fact that mistakes WILL be made is not a question of the IQ of the users, but rather of statistics. The greater the number of users, and the most flawed the interface is, the greater number of mistakes. When you take a big enough number of people, a certain number of them is bound to be absent minded at a given time, specially if they are performing a task that's supposed to be trivial. YES, that means that, when it comes to bad interface design for simple tasks, intelligence often works AGAINST the user, for the less smart ones will take the time to "study" the interface, while the smarter ones will just use common sense and concentrate on finishing the task as fast as possible.

So, if you are happy that so many people in Florida made mistakes while voting and that helped your candidate, fine for you. But the fact is, the ballot in question is SERIOUSLY flawed, no matter who designed it, or if it was approved or not, and if you try to avoid this fact by saying that those who made mistakes are dumb, you are only showing your ignorance, and your lack of interest in the electoral process. To put it in another way, you are making it very clear that, as long as your candidate wins, it doesn't matter if it is through an election or through a coup d'état.

Marino