Missed One! How Ballot Layout and Visual Task Strategy Can Interact to Produce Voting Errors

This paper presents an ACT-R model designed to simulate voting behavior on full-face paper ballots. The model implements a non-standard voting strategy: the strategy votes first from left to right on a ballot and then from top to bottom. We ran this model on 6600 randomly-generated ballots governed by three different variables that affected the visual layout of the ballot. The findings suggest that our model’s error behavior is emergent and sensitive to ballot structure. These results represent an important step towards our goal of creating a software tool capable of identifying bad ballot design.