2010 Rhode Island Ballots
The link below leads to downloads of the 2010 Master Lever ballots for the town of Burrillville, RI. We have scanned these ballots and placed them online for the voters of Rhode Island to make their own assessment of how Rhode Island voters utilize the Master Lever. We extracted roughly 600 master lever ballots from thousands of ballots cast in Burrillville in 2010.
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Sampling of Burrillville ballots showing clear evidence of voter confusion of the master lever:
| Typical Moderate Party Master Lever Ballot in Burrillville | Mismarked Ballot | Master Lever with all 3 parties marked |
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The most interesting ballots are the two files for the Moderate Party Master Lever ballots. Detailed analysis of these ballots shows the following:
Out of 116 total Moderate Party Master Lever ballots, 71 of those ballots - or 61% - yielded NO vote for any of the Moderate Party candidates on the ballot. This is a telling statistic, showing that these voters are not understanding what the purpose of the Master Lever mechanism is supposed to be.
An analysis of the Moderate Party Master Lever ballots from the 2010 Burrillville elections shows the following results:
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Additional findings from our analysis of the ballot data include:
29% of Burrillville Master Lever ballots also include individual markings for *every* race on the ballot. These voters are indicating their political philosophy when marking the master lever – not using it as a voting mechanism.
34% of Burrillville Master Lever ballots included at least one but less than 4 Town Council markings. When a Master Lever voter marks a multi-seat race, the Master Lever does not count for any of the seats in that race – but that fact is not understood by many voters – or even many elected officials. The net result is an under vote in that race, when the voter's intent – based on the Master Lever choice – should have been to vote for any party member running in that race.
28% of Burrillville Master Lever ballots resulted in a non-partisan School Committee under vote. The Master Lever does not apply in non-partisan races – a fact which many voters do not understand as evidenced by the large under vote which has been well documented for many years. This disenfranchises both voters and candidates and is a particularly awful impact of the Master Lever.
The unmistakable conclusion that can be drawn from this data is that Master Lever voters do not understand the purpose of the Master Lever and its proper use.
**About these ballots: These ballots were made available to Ken Block, Beverly Clay, John Marion and Mark Brizzard after the Board of Elections released the Town of Burrillville from the legislated requirement to keep the ballots under seal for 22 months post-election. We pulled as many of the Master Lever ballots as we could find in the thousands of pages of ballots, and Beverly Clay performed the statistical analysis of the data for the group. We welcome outside analysis of these ballots, and believe that all ballots should be public documents viewable by the public and made available online, as several states have done around the country.