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What are some examples of unintentionally confusing ballot designs used in relatively recent elections (say, 1980 onwards)? Examples from non-american countries are fine if accompanied by an English translation.
Note: I'm not looking for stuff like historically used literacy tests - the key word is unintentional.
2000 Presidential Election in Palm Beach, Florida
In the 2000 election, Palm Beach County was using a hole-punch voting machine with a single column of holes. Hole-punch ballots are inherently error-prone in multiple ways, but this was compounded by a layout design error.
Most offices had 2-5 candidates; the names could all fit on one side of the punch with lots of space between holes. However, the Presidential election requires listing both the candidate & their Vice President running-mate, and furthermore 10 parties qualified for the ballot.
The local Board of Elections handled this by alternating entries on either side of the hole punch, with a design compared to butterfly wings. The first six parties were staggered down the left side using the odd-numbered holes. The right side of the ballot held the remaining tickets (and a write-in space) and aligned with the even-numbered holes.
etc.
Compared to other parts of Florida, a highly disproportionate number of Palm Beach ballots were either cast for Buchanan, or disqualified for over-voting both Buchanan & Gore. Academic studies suggest that about 2000 Gore supporters miscast their vote for Buchanan, and even more over-voted.
How important was this mistake? Well, Bush's final margin of victory in Florida was only 537 votes. An additional 2000+ votes in Gore's favor would have easily tipped Florida, and due to USA's unusual "Electoral College" system, would also tip the nationwide result.
BTW, the same disproportionate error had occurred in the 1996 election, costing a similar number of votes for Bob Dole, but that election wasn't close so it went mostly ignored until after 2000.
In the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, which operates under the Additional Members System (AMS), the ballots for the regional and constituency votes were combined onto one piece of paper, as below. This marked a change from the previous elections in 2003, where the ballots were split onto separate pieces of paper.
Many voters were confused by this new arrangement and either ignored one side of the ballot paper, used two votes on each ballot, or both votes on one ballot or similar. The elections also took place in conjunction with the Scottish local elections, which switched to Single Transferable Vote (STV) that year - meaning voters had to number candidates in order of preference. Although this took place on a separate ballot paper, some voters tried to number candidates in order of preference on the parliamentary ballot as well. The Electoral Commission produced an independent review into the elections which was published in October of 2007. The images in this answer are borrowed from said review.
There were a large proportion of rejected ballot papers - with roughly 3% of the regional ballots and 4% of the constituency ballots being rejected nationwide, and in some constituencies a rejection rate of over 10%. A breakdown of the reasons for rejecting ballots is shown above.
In particular, in two regions, Glasgow and Lothians, there were a large number of candidates for the regional ballot, which meant a redesigned ballot paper was used to avoid changing the size of paper. This redesign removed the directional arrows and had abbreviated instructions at the top of the paper, which the Electoral Commission's review found may have contributed to that area's high rejection rate - although it also proposed that the high level of social deprivation could also go some way to explaining this incongruence.
The review recommended that in the future, the regional and constituency ballot papers should be separated, and there should be a "greater focus on contingency plans to ensure the number of political parties and candidates can be accommodated".
The Brennan Center for Justice has done some work on this exact question. Their full article can be found here, but I'll list a few of the examples they've gathered.
