07 December 2000 Nature 408, 665 - 666 (2000) Psychology: An electoral butterfly effect ROBERT C. SINCLAIR, MELVIN M. MARK, SEAN E. MOORE, CARRIE A. LAVIS & ALEXANDER S. SOLDAT 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. ------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Department web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy Check out TIPS listserv for teachers of psychology at: http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/psyc/southerly/tips/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------
