The butterfly ballot was designed by the Palm Beach County, Florida, election board prior to the Campaign of 2000 for use in a punch card voting machine. The butterfly ballot format has a vertical array of holes in the center of the ballot where the voter must punch out their candidate preference with a stylus. The candidates’ names are arranged in columns to both the left and the right of this vertical line of holes (presumably, resembling the wings of a butterfly, whereas the holes to be punched resemble the body of a butterfly).
While the butterfly design had been used in numerous elections prior to the Campaign of 2000, the consequences of its use in Palm Beach in 2000 were monumental. The ballot design, in which the presidential candidate was listed on one line, with the running mate listed below, was confusing for some voters. Some voters misread the line associated with the hole to be punched and selected Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, when they intended to vote for Democrat Al Gore. Political scientists estimate that this cost Gore approximately two thousand misdirected votes in Palm Beach County. Other voters were under the impression that two holes needed to be punched, one for the presidential nominee and the other for the running mate. Thus, 6,607 of Gore’s votes were discarded because the voter had also punched out the hole for the adjacent candidate (in this case, Buchanan). According to the Palm Beach Post, the discarded votes for Gore totaled more than ten times the margin by which George W. Bush won the state (and its twenty-five electoral votes).
In response to the disputed election of 2000, critics widely argued that states needed to reform their voting methods, equipment, and procedures. Many states have since moved to electronic, computer-scanned voting machines and increased early voting to reduce the length of voting lines.
CNN. “Newspaper: Butterfly Ballot Cost Gore White House.” CNN Politics, March 11, 2001. http://articles.cnn.com/2001-03-11/politics/palmbeach.recount_1_gore-buchanan-gore-and-reform-party-butterfly-ballot?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS. Accessed September 22, 2015.
Correspondents of the New York Times. Thirty-Six Days: The Complete Chronicle of the 2000 Presidential Election Crisis. New York: Times Books, 2001.
“Florida 2000.” Vote: The Machinery of Democracy (online exhibit), Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Behring Center. http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/florida.html. Accessed September 22, 2015.
Toobin, Jeffrey. Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election. New York: Random House, 2002.
2000 Florida Ballots Project. http://electionstudies.org/florida2000. Accessed September 22, 2015.
Wand, Jonathan N., Kenneth W. Shotts, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, Walter R. Mebane Jr., Michael C. Herron, and Henry E. Brady. “The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida.” American Political Science Review 95, no. 4 (December 2001): 793–810.