“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Voter Needs

So, what exactly are a voter’s needs today? We would contend that they are the following:

• To be informed (about the issues, the candidates, the process, and the logistics)
• Ease and clarity of registration
• Convenient access to voting tools and polling places
• Simplicity
• Privacy and security
• To feel confident that one’s vote matters, that it has been cast as intended, and has been counted
• To feel a sense of participation and connectedness with one’s community
• To have trust in the system and the outcome

All of these needs are critical, but we’ll keep most of the discussion that follows later in this post to the last three, which are key to motivating voters to participate. Confidence, trust, and connection ultimately result from a system that is open and transparent. If that system also follows principles of good, user-centered design and provides appropriate feedback, has built-in redundancy for vote tabulation, and includes real voters in the design and refinement of the processes and tools, then it should be a system that voters can trust, rather than one that produces the doubt and cynicism expressed by this Cincinnati woman in 2004.

(Mike Simons / Getty Images)

Being Informed: Voter Education

Let’s just make a couple quick points here about the need to “be informed” and the issue of convenience. Like President Roosevelt said, the real safeguard of our democracy is education. Today, as we face a rapidly changing world and increasing global competition, it will be critical that we focus on educating children for the jobs of the future and plan for re-training and continuing education for existing workers whose jobs may not remain for long. This is certainly one way in which education will represent a key to protecting our democracy.

But on the point of voter education, we also still have a long way to go. We personally know many well-educated, hard-working people who are excited about this presidential election, yet they admit ignorance about many of the local contests and initiatives/referenda on their ballots (they should check out Ballotpedia).

Nonetheless, the tools and access provided by the Internet are nothing short of astounding when it comes to addressing voter education. Wikis, social networking applications, Twitter reports, video sits, and user-generated content are complementing the vast resources available from government, the candidates’ campaigns, think tanks, and major media sources.

However, a plethora of tools and data alone doesn’t translate into actionable or useful information for voters. That is where information design and UX/UI design can play a more important role. In addition, not all Americans are exposed equally to the diversity of tools and information available (many probably stick to the more familiar sources) and there is a lot of misinformation available online as well. Despite these concerns, the explosion of interest and resources online is a positive trend that will only get better in the future.

Convenience

As to convenience, there is a powerful argument for making the process of registering and voting more convenient for and accessible to everyone. Despite moves to that effect, including early voting, “no excuse” absentee voting, and mail-in voting, we still hear stories today about people standing in line in Los Angeles, for instance, for 3-5 hours to vote early. And, contrary to what one might expect, mail-in voting has not necessarily increased voter turnout or participation. Furthermore, mail-in voting is susceptible to corruption and fraud in the form of coerced voting, vote buying, or forged signatures. However, voting from home also can protect individuals’ privacy, particularly those who might experience intimidation at polling places, and it makes it easier for the ill or physically-challenged to exercise their right to vote.

Some critics also argue that mail-in voting takes the social or civic engagement out of voting. This may be true in some cases, but we’ve also heard anecdotes here in Washington of voters filling out their mail-in ballots and dropping them off in person at City Hall in order to experience that sense of connection with the community.

Regardless of the critiques, these actions to increase convenience demonstrate a trend which will continue towards making the registration and voting process more convenient and sensitive to the needs of a diverse electorate. While there will always be a need to improve security to avoid electoral fraud, ultimately having these options will help prevent the disenfranchisement of voters by long lines or other inefficiencies and inconveniences that make the act of voting truly difficult for some people.

One additional need that we believe represents a great opportunity for future voting systems is providing a means for the individual voter to personally verify that his or her vote has been received and counted. The challenge there will be security and privacy, of course, but we can imagine a day when a ballot can be “tracked” like a package.

Obstacles and Inefficiencies

The current situation with the voter experience is rife with obstacles and inefficiencies which compromise voter needs and goals. These ongoing challenges for the future include, but are not limited to:

• Voter suppression: a blanket term for the use of governmental power, political campaign strategy, and private resources aimed at reducing the total vote, sometimes involving intimidation, and ultimately leading to disenfranchisement
• Disenfranchisement: explicitly through law, implicitly through intimidation, indirectly due to technical errors, or in a de facto way due to lack of training or misleading information
• Voter purging: necessary in order to maintain dependable, up-to-date, and accurate voter registration lists (or “voter rolls”), but practiced without transparency and oversight, often in secrecy, relying on error-ridden lists, and without providing any sort of notice to those affected
• Vulnerability to hacking: represents a serious concern to many voters and has been demonstrated repeatedly by computer science and security experts at Princeton, UCSB, and many other universities
• Long lines: mentioned earlier, it may have many causes, including poor planning, machine failure, lack of resources, lack of training, and problems with voter rolls, which often results in voter disenfranchisement (or having only one location for early voting for all of Los Angeles!)
• Electoral fraud: another blanket term which can describe any type of manipulation or interference with an election… nothing new, but an ongoing challenge, nonetheless
• Misinformation and disinformation: the unintentional (former) and deliberate (latter) spreading of false information, which could be propaganda, mistakes that lead to voter confusion, or just election season dirty tricks attempting to suppress voter turnout during election period (like phony fliers)
• Usability and design: given national attention by the problems voters had with the “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000, this includes anything from information design to typography and alignment to wording and language to logic and feedback

Usability Issues

There has been a lot of attention in our community on usability issues related to paper and onscreen ballots. Several reputable organizations have taken it upon themselves to improve the process. After the 2000 election, AIGA Design for Democracy centered its focus on election design, beginning with solutions for election officials in Illinois and Oregon, and eventually developing design guidelines for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These guidelines help improve ballot design, both on paper and on screen, through improved readability, typography, graphic design, information hierarchy, and the use of simple, easy to understand language. The result is a valuable set of guidelines for election officials to vastly improve the usability of ballots.

In 2007, Design for Democracy also succeeded in publishing research and best practice recommendations for the information design of ballots and polling places, which were accepted nationally by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC is the independent agency of the U.S. government created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to serve as a resource for election administrators and to establish standards for voting systems (which as yet remain voluntary, by the way, likely explaining their lack of broad adoption).

In addition, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has produced a set of ballot design guidelines in collaboration with a number of the leading usability experts, designers, voting systems experts, political scientists, and election officials. They have identified 13 common design problems with ballots, as well as a number of state and local laws that actually interfere with good design and usability. For example, a recent editorial from The New York Times criticized a law that actually requires, albeit inadvertently, that ballots violate some obvious principles of good design: “New York has long had a misguided ‘full-face ballot’ law that requires every race to be listed on a single screen or piece of paper. Experts say that leads to information overload, voter confusion and errors.” The editorial staff goes a step further, adding that “there is also remarkably little usability testing before elections, which would allow officials to learn in advance when ballots have problems.”

While some local jurisdictions are probably applying the design principles successfully to their own ballots and polling places, due to the highly decentralized election system in this country, it is difficult to know exactly how pervasive the guidelines have become in one year.

Have qualified designers or consultants been brought in to create or review ballot designs, for example? Has this become a standard part of the process of local election officials?

We suspect that the answer is no, or perhaps not enough. In addition, we wonder to what extent real users, actual voters of different ages, origins, demographic, and psychographic makeup have been brought into the process. Have ballot designs, user interaction, polling place designs, and signage been tested with real users? An iterative approach involving rapid prototyping and testing could be very quick and effective without great expense, but we doubt that this has become engrained in the culture of election administrators on a large scale.

As a design consultancy, we would love to, for example, take the guidelines and standards developed for the EAC (as well as insights into voter needs and goals) and work with the software and hardware developers of DRE voting machines to create an improved user experience, vetted through concept and usability testing with actual voters. And, should every state choose to do things a little differently, we don’t imagine that state or local election officials would be wanting for help. Jon Pincus, the founder of the Voter Suppression Wiki, agrees: “there are more than 50 qualified design firms in the United States. So, that shouldn’t be a fundamental limitation.”

The Larger Voting Process

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves — and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”
– Tom Stoppard, British playwright

The Brennan Center estimates that tens to hundreds of thousands of votes are lost or miscast in every election due to bad ballot design, confusing instructions, and poor usability, resulting “in far more lost votes than software glitches, programming errors, or machine breakdowns.” In a close election, like several recent national and state contests, the disenfranchisement of this many voters can play a decisive role. As the Brennan Center argues, “candidates should win or lose elections based upon whether or not they are preferred by a majority of voters, not on whether they have the largest number of supporters who — as a result of education and experience — have greater facility navigating unnecessarily complicated interfaces or complex instructions, or because fewer of their supporters are elderly or have reading disabilities.”

We agree, but, it’s also important to put things in perspective.

One of the most lofty goals of a democracy should be the active participation of all of its citizens in the democratic process. As Thomas Paine wrote, “the right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.” Therefore, any discussion of elections and voting should remember to measure the relative gravity of a problem by the number of people it prevents from exercising their franchise as intended. So, by this measure, we could probably rank the problems we face as follows:

1. Apathy & laziness: several tens of millions of potential voters (source: Dr. Michael McDonald at GMU)
2. Voter suppression, purging, and disenfranchisement: hundreds of thousands to a few millions of voters (source: Brennan Center)
3. Bad ballot design and confusing instructions: tens to hundreds of thousands of lost or miscast votes in every election, which we assume includes electronic voting machines as well paper ballots (source: Brennan Center)
4. Long lines and other administrative inefficiencies leading to disenfranchisement: tens of thousands of voters? (our guess)
5. Software glitches, programming errors, machine breakdowns: thousands? (another guess)
6. Hacking: none so far? (has anyone yet proven this to have happened?)

According to analysis from Dr. Michael McDonald at George Mason University, the voter eligible population in the 2004 general election was approximately 203 million, with about 60% turning out and voting for the highest office on the ballot. That means more than 81 million eligible voters did not vote.

Clearly, voter turnout is the most serious problem facing our voting system — a problem that will require a lot more than just better design and technology to improve.

To help illustrate the other issues, obstacles, and inefficiencies contributing to our many voting challenges, let’s consider this diagram of the larger voter process and ecosystem:

Larger Voting Process and Ecosystem

In the above sketch, the parts in red indicate areas that have aroused a lot of public concern due to the opacity of the process. Private companies are able to protect their intellectual property and don’t have to reveal how their machines work. In addition, despite the establishment of the EAC by the Help America Vote Act and the creation of standards and guidelines for voting systems and election administration, there are still concerns that the standards are voluntary and weak, and the process for vetting machines and software is fundamentally unsound.

Dr. Michael Shamos from Carnegie Mellon University minced no words in his testimony to the Environment, Technology, and Standards Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science on June 24, 2004: “I am here today to offer my opinion that the system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent. It must be re-created from scratch or we will never restore public confidence in elections.”

We would also like to see the process for development of software, hardware, and other voting technology to be open, transparent, and peer-reviewed. More participation from the public, the general technology community, scholars, and experts would help ensure that the machinery of our elections isn’t controlled entirely by private, and possibly partisan, companies.

The Brennan Center also recommends that the federal government increase its role in the process of voting system and ballot design and testing, for every machine model, and by providing funding for usability testing. We would add that the EAC should make standards mandatory and enforceable, encourage cooperation between election officials and design and usability experts, and take a more proactive role in the dissemination of standards and guidelines to state and local authorities.

Registration list maintenance by state governments also remains a highly opaque process which has led to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. Research has found that “over the past several years, every single purge list the Brennan Center has reviewed has been flawed” and that many of those identified on purge lists were in fact eligible to vote. The Brennan Center outlines a number of recommendations we agree with that might help bring more regularity and accountability to the practice of voter roll maintenance.

So, where do digital tools and technologies play a role on the ecosystem diagram above?

For voters, wikis like the Voter Suppression Wiki and the Election Protection Wiki are helping to inform people as they prepare to vote and to document activities that may interfere with their attempts to exercise that right. Over time, that documentation becomes a valuable resource and record of the situation across the country. Twitter is being used as a rapid way to disseminate similar types of news and information on voter suppression and election integrity issues. Check out Twitter Vote Report and its visualization on Plodt for more. Additional information and reports are also available on Our Vote Live, and incidents can be reported through their hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

But notice the “voter limbo” in the diagram above. After submitting one’s ballot, whether it’s paper or electronic, the vote itself essentially disappears into the election administration machinery. Is there a future opportunity there? And all the tools for education and communication, yet often voters are surprised at what they see and experience at the polling place on Election Day? What about creating tools to accurately prepare ballots and check that they will be “readable” in advance? Couldn’t this also speed up the process at polling places?

If we look at what the media is doing, CNN’s John King is showcasing the amazing possibilities of multitouch displays on the cable news channel’s Perceptive Pixel multitouch display. These possibilities expand beyond just analysis of news to also allow simulations and scenarios to be explored quickly and visually. MSNBC is now doing the same with a Microsoft Surface table in its television coverage of the election.

The candidates themselves are definitely embracing technology and the Internet, in particular Barack Obama. Taking Howard Dean’s lead from the 2004 election, his campaign has leveraged the Internet, social networking sites, and other tools to create an impressive, yet highly decentralized grassroots organization of empowered supporters, with incredible fundraising prowess to boot!

In election administration, one big concern is the bad planning, poor allocation of resources, and untrained poll workers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees that “poorly-designed machines are not the only problem. Most election workers remain woefully under-trained regarding potential e-voting problems. Vendor technicians frequently have unsupervised access to voting equipment. Local election officials routinely deny attempts to examine e-voting audit data.” Can those processes be designed better?

One more opportunity for improvement in the future is addressing the lack of integration or synchronization of government services and databases which leads to many of the problems related to registration and voter purges. As Charles Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the IIT Institute of Design explains, “elections are just one more thing that government manages and orchestrates. There are so many services out there, and they are so independent and so difficult to weave your way through that it would seem to me rather obvious that we will be seeing… a move to integrate a lot of this within some kind of .org or .gov part of the overall networking system.” As it is today, he says, “it’s just so out of date.”

But, we’ll talk more about the future in our last installment… in the meantime, let’s brace ourselves for tomorrow, hoping that this historic election with an anticipated record turnout unfolds without any major issues cropping up to destroy public confidence in the process and divide the country any further.

Stay tuned for “Part 3: Trends and the Future of the Voter Experience”