The not so simple act of voting: an examination of voter errors with electronic voting

Electronic voting systems offer the promise of more accurate voting, devoid of overvotes, hanging chads, and the like. But beyond checking for spoiled ballots, no tests have been conducted of the accuracy with which voters cast their ballots. Using data from a unique field experiment, we investigated the extent to which voters cast their votes as intended on six different voting systems. For a single office, in straightforward situations, roughly 97 percent voted the way they intended. However, about 20 percent of the voters made at least one error on their ballot. The most common error was inadvertently selecting th