Design and Democracy: Week 1

Redesigning the U.S. absentee ballot: getting started, immersion, and category research

I’m currently taking a class at Berkeley called Design Innovation (Des Inv) 10: Discovering Design. It’s an introductory survey class that goes over a wide variety of topics relevant to the wide world of design, including design thinking, a general history of design, different design industries, the social impact of design, and the human-centered design process.

Last week, the class began final projects, to an open prompt — the overarching assignment is to find, investigate, and design for “any space,” whether that space is museums, calendar apps, bike parking, or car-sharing services. Any space.

To begin, my Week 1 assignment included a few tasks:

1. Pick a design space.
2. Do initial research into that space.
3. Organize through that research, looking for certain patterns, categories, or themes.
4. Look for (re)design opportunities.

Picking a Design Space

I stumbled upon my design space last week, on the eve of the 2016 General Election. I’m a student in California, but I’m registered to vote in New Jersey, so last week, I sent a mail-in ballot.

This may have partially been my fault, as I’ve been pretty out of the loop on New Jersey politics, but my voting experience was cumbersome to say the least — throughout the process, I had trouble with directions, antiquated language, and the visual design of the ballot.

As much as I’d like to believe in the election system, I don’t believe that I’m alone in my frustration with voting.

So, for my final project for Des Inv 10, I’ll be exploring the design space of voting in U.S. elections. It’s a large, complicated, and messy space, but it’s a design space that’s inextricably tied to a functioning democracy.

Initial Research

After settling upon a design space, I took to the internet to start research, beginning with this piece from the Pacific Standard. The piece is a general survey of bad ballot design in the U.S. from over the last 15 years — it discusses the butterfly ballot made most infamous during the 2000 presidential election, issues with visual design of ballots, how laws complicate and restrict ballot design, and work that’s already been done to push for better design in elections. A few lines expressed the significant implications of poorly designed ballots:

…we still likely lose hundreds of thousands of votes every election year due to poor ballot design and instructions. In 2008 and 2010 alone, almost half a million people did not have their votes counted due to mistakes filling out the ballot. (Pacific Standard)

A real threat to democracy exists when poorly designed instructions on ballots bars thousands from contributing their voice in their government.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg — issues exist in so many other aspects of the voting process, including voter registration, polling places, physical ballots, absentee ballots, and informational packets. Here are some highlights:

• There are some pretty high barriers to entry to vote in the U.S., such as required registration and voting on Tuesdays.
• The voting system does not hold up to accessibility standards.
• The registration process is kind of awful — 2.2 million voters weren’t able to cast a ballot that counted in 2008 due to registration problems.
• As mentioned in the Pacific Standard article, ballot design can be really difficult when there’s 34 candidates running for 1 position.
• As more states adopt a vote-by-mail system, voting is more accessible to people who may be unable to be at physical polling locations, but absentee ballots are prone to problems with late postmarks, unsigned envelopes, and duplicate voting. Additionally, absentee voting is more open to potential fraud.
• In my own house, I found the Alameda County and California State voter guides discarded with junk mail — they’re both hefty packets, filled with dry, dense information. I wouldn’t have wanted to read through the guides, and I doubt my housemates who vote in California want to either — I did, after all, find the guides in our junk mail stash.

Stacks on stacks on stacks… of 224-page guides of full proposition text and interpretations of propositions on the California general election ballot. By the way, these cost taxpayers $15 million. (LA Times)

So, there’s a lot to dig through. Each issue on its own is already substantial, and adding all of these issues up, it’s clear that the election system in the U.S. is incredibly flawed. However, it’s also clear that there’s opportunities to design for solutions to these issues.

But I obviously can’t overhaul the entire election system in a 7-week school project, and a lot of work has already been done by other groups to address some issues:

• IDEO is working with LA County to build a better voting machine.
• AIGA’s Design for Democracy Initiative has put forth a set of guidelines for better ballots.
• Rock the Vote campaigns to increase voter turnout in teenagers and young adults.
• Citizen & Citizens made ballot.fyi, a comprehensive, nonpartisan, well-designed online guide to the propositions being voted on in California in the 2016 general election.
• Lots of work on increasing voter participation (with a very similar title, Design+Democracy) has been done in New Zealand.

So while existing work addresses voting machines, physical ballots, general voter turnout, and informational packets, I didn’t see any work on absentee ballots — which returns me to my original frustration with absentee voting, and this where I found a redesign opportunity.

(Re)design Opportunity

I’ll be exploring the absentee voting experience, as absentee voting is the subspace that I’m personally most familiar with and a subspace with little to no existing redesign work. As I mentioned above, problems such as late postmarks, unsigned envelopes, and duplicate voting currently undermine the absentee voting experience, so I’ll be investigating a handful of potential solutions, including redesigning packaging, overhauling visual design, and potentially digitizing the absentee ballot.

Moving on, I’ll be conducting user research, brainstorming and ideating on various solutions, testing potential solutions, and eventually refining one final idea.

I may not be able to show up to my physical polling location in New Jersey, but poor design of an absentee ballot should not be a barrier to my vote counting on Election Day.

Also, don’t forget to vote next Tuesday, November 8!

I’ll (hopefully) be posting weekly as I go through research, ideation, iteration, and refinement of my project, Design and Democracy. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated!