Civic design and responsive government

Civic design is the face of policy. It’s the everyday experience of registering to vote, signing up for a ballot by mail, or voting in person. It’s the letters from a government office and the tax and Medicaid forms you fill out. It’s the government website you need for information and the screens you see at the DMV.

At its best, civic design creates an experience that invites everyone to participate by bridging the gap between the complexities of government and the needs of people. At its worst, it’s a source of error, delay, and frustration.

Making a government experience that works for people starts with designing for the real world and the real people who the government serves. People who don’t always read instructions and who don’t have infinite time or patience.

Too often, implementation is created directly from the policy, with legal language and complexities left intact. That’s bad enough when a policy is clear, but confusing or complex policy usually results in confusing and complex forms, applications, and websites.

Every time a government official writes a notice, creates a new form, or adds information to a website, they are designing, whether they think about it that way or not. They need the civic design skills to serve the public well, not just convert legal requirements into forms.

Basic civic design principles for plain language, usability, accessibility, and infodesign are the starting point. Good design also considers people’s abilities and attitudes, the context for the information, and possible civic literacy gaps. And it invites community participation and feedback.

In Center for Civic Design’s research for best practices in voter guides, we learned that people were unfamiliar with many words that are key to understanding elections: primary, endorsement, provisional voting, precinct, early voting, polls, and even party. They may not know the words at all, or not understand how they are used in elections. Either way, they skipped or misunderstood important information in materials that were intended to inform and educate. Why not write in plain language that everyone understands?

When we ask people about the problems they’ve had voting, they complain that ballot questions are not only hard to read, but appear designed to confuse or mislead them. When we ask millions of people to weigh in on important questions, why can’t we take the time to be clear about the decision they are making?

In fact, why shouldn’t everything we ask people to read, sign, or decide — from tax filings to DMV forms to Medicaid enrollment applications — be written in language everyone can understand? It’s not impossible.

In an analysis of the forms that voters sign on mail ballot envelopes, we show how to use simple techniques of plain language to transform them from a post-graduate reading level to a more reasonable middle school level text. Shouldn’t voters be able to confidently say that they are eligible to vote by mail because the requirements are written clearly?

Consider the original and revised section from a Voter Declaration on a mail-in ballot envelope. Which is clearer? Which statement would you rather sign?

Original: I opened the envelope marked “ballot within” and marked the ballot(s) in the presence of the witness, without assistance or knowledge on the part of anyone as to the manner in which I marked it.

Revision: I opened the envelope and marked my ballot with a witness watching. I marked my ballot in secret without help.

The result of better design is not only better feelings about government, but also a better functioning government.

When mail-in ballots are designed well, fewer voters making mistakes and more votes getting counted.

• In Michigan, after the state adopted both no-excuse absentee voting and a new envelope design that made the signature space more visible, the number of unsigned mail ballot envelopes dropped from 0.49% in 2016 to 0.06% in the 2020 primary.
• In New York City during 2020, the number of rejected mail ballots dropped from over 22% in the primary to less than 4% in the November election. The difference? Redesigned envelopes and well-designed voter outreach campaigns.

Too often, people who don’t vote are called apathetic. But, that’s not necessarily true. In the 2022 Texas primary election, 25,000 absentee ballots (almost 12% of the ballots returned) were rejected. Voters made an effort to request a ballot, mark it, and mail it back. Those voters — and so many others in our civic design research over the years — are probably exactly the sort of people who get called apathetic. We don’t believe they are. They are confused, disheartened, angry at being excluded, or simply discouraged. But not apathetic.

The problem is often that people inside government aren’t thinking about how to talk to people who are not government insiders. They expect the people they serve to respond to them — rather than making government itself responsive. That starts with people-centered civic design.

Whitney is the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Civic Design and a Fellow of the Institute for Responsive Government. The Center’s team of civic researchers and designers work with elections offices and advocates across the country to make elections easier to run and invite every eligible voter to participate.

The Center for Civic Design’s tools for civic engagement include best practices for election forms and other information supported by our skills in plain language, usability, accessibility and powered by our 10+ years of research with voters and implementation of election policy. To explore them all, visit civicdesign.org and electiontools.org