IFAS Matters - October 2012

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Jack Payne

I voted this morning, but I can't say that it was easy. Our absentee ballots came in the mail last week and since I'm familiar with most the candidates, I figured that I would zip right through mine, pop it in the mailbox, and be ahead of the game. That was until I got to the amendments.

Unlike candidate selection, amendments demand that voters tackle complex issues. This year, Floridians have numerous constitutional amendments to ponder. Perhaps I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I wasn't willing to fill in the amendment bubbles until I consulted a reputable, non-partisan source, the UF/IFAS EDIS website, to make sure that I understood them. A series of fact sheets on explaining the amendments by Dr. Rodney Clouser, a professor from the UF/IFAS Dept. of Food and Resource Economics, are quite helpful in educating voters about these amendments. The fact sheets can be accessed by going to the EDIS website or simply doing a search for Florida amendments by Rodney Clouser.

As it turned out, I'm not alone. Making ballot questions readable was the topic of a recent study, “Ballot Readability and Roll-Off: the Impact of Language Complexity” by professors Shauna Reilly of Northern Kentucky University and Sean Richey of Georgia State University. The study explored whether the readability of ballot questions had an effect on voter participation. The authors analyzed 1,112 ballot measures from 1997 through 2007. They measured readability by applying the Flesch-Kincaid scale, a system that scores text according to the grade level of education required for comprehension.

It is interesting to note that:

• Many newspapers and magazines are written to a 9th grade level
• USA Today, New York Times, and the New Yorker are written to a 10th grade level
• John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King, write at a 7th grade level
• Romance novels are often written at a 5th grade level

I wasn't surprised that the study found a direct correlation between the grade level of the ballot question and voter participation. Regardless of the topic, the measures that were written in complex language were voted on less frequently than those written in plain language.

In addition, the authors of the study found that all ballots included in their survey contained language that exceeded that 8th grade reading proficiency and that well over half of the propositions analyzed fell into the graduate-school level or higher on the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

The biggest concern was that complex ballot language could confuse voters. Moreover, confused voters may end up casting a vote for the policy they don't want-or opting out of voting at all.

By the way, the Flesch-Kincaid scale for this column is 11.1.

Please vote!

-Jack

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