Voter Suppression on Marginalized Citizens
Problem Statement
We consider America to be the epitome of democracy. However, if that were effectively true, shouldn’t we see a strong persistence to alleviate any barriers that may inhibit citizens from being able to contribute to their opinion? In reality, we are seeing quite the opposite. In political society, voters that did not end up casting votes (for an expansive list of reasons) are blamed for their inability to enact this civil right and are often seem as “lazy”. But upon further examination of the objectively complex system that goes into casting a ballot, we begin to shed light on the different aspects that can make every single step leading up to actually submitting a ballot exponentially more difficult. In America, there are many groups of individuals, encompassing what the true “average” American looks like, that face significant challenges when attempting to exercise their right to vote. We will explore and analyze these different factors, not necessarily all policy-based, that work together to power the disenfranchisement of marginalized voters in the United States.
In every U.S. election, we see a recurring problem of voter suppression on marginalized groups. These groups face different types of barriers that effectively prevent (or strongly hinder) them from successfully casting their ballot and contributing to the electoral process. States are passing restrictive voting measures that are keeping eligible voters from participating in elections. Political parties are coordinating efforts to block the votes of marginalized groups because they are intimidated by the increasing political participation from voters of color that could swing the way power is divided in this country. On top of the systematic policies put in place that keep lower-resourced communities and individuals from accessing this right, they are taught to just accept the intricately complicated process as necessary and a strong indicator of who is “deserving” of being able to vote, even when it is an American right. We intend to shed light on the unnecessarily back-breaking steps and hoops that marginalized voters face and how it is, in fact, intentional and overly filtering voices.
Research
To gain more knowledge on the systematic oppression of marginalized voters, we constructed mind maps on the book The Politics of Disenfranchisement by Richard K. Scher and on the academic article “The Past as Prologue: Defending Democracy Against Voter Suppression Tactics on the Eve of the 2012 Election” by Ryan P. Haygood. A main takeaway from Haygood’s article was how states have accelerated an assault on voting rights through a new wave of “third generation” voting barriers. He details these concerted “block the vote” efforts and examines the effects they’ve had on marginalized voters. We include his research on state limitations on when and where voters can register in one of our stories in our explainer.
The Politics of Disenfranchisement beautifully described from the perspective of the voter the barriers they face, how these barriers are systematically perpetuated, and why the government wants it that way. Scher goes into depth about the history of how the current discriminatory factors came to be and shines a spotlight on America’s continuing contribution to and covering up of such injustices.
When searching for individuals to interview, we not only wanted to better understand the experience of a marginalized voter, but we also wanted to gain more perspective on how much knowledge an individual has on voter suppression.
We first interviewed a woman who was born and raised in Mexico and has been living in the U.S. ever since she was 18 years old. She became a U.S. citizen in 2008 to both gain the benefits of citizenship and be able to vote. She voted for Obama and Clinton in the past two presidential elections. One of the challenges she encountered that stood out to us the most was how she did not realize that there were more parts to the ballot other than voting for a presidential candidate. Because English was her second language and she was not informed about the other categories she had to vote for, she decided it was best to just select the Democratic options. She plans to educate herself of everything she will have to vote for in the next upcoming election. We included parts of her experience in one of our stories in our explainer. Below is a mind map we created from her interview notes.
In our second interview, we were able to speak with a Stanford senior majoring in Electrical Engineering, with limited knowledge on the political system. However, due to a project she did back in high school, she did have particular insight regarding voter suppression and Stacey Abrams’ work to highlight and alleviate the issue. After giving a non-detailed overview of our problem, our interviewee was able to break it down into different subcategories around “increasing education” and “increasing accessibility”. Although taking a stance as having an overall average knowledge of the political system, she was still able to provide a lot of insight and talking points. Below is the mind map she created to explain our topic.
Models and Sketches
During our ideation process, a main theme that came across every phase was having our explainer describe and highlight the challenges that marginalized voters encounter in their voting experience. When we expanded on some of our sticky note ideas with more detail in the index card phase, we realized that we wanted our explainer to be interactive with our audience so that they could be more engaged with the information presented to them. We integrated aspects of most of our ideas into two wireflows.
The first wireflow was for a phone app where the user can follow the voting journeys of marginalized citizens to learn about the specific difficulties each individual faces. Each story incorporated facts and real life experiences through the thoughts of the voter, dialogue between characters, and questions which the user would attempt to answer.
The second wireflow details a website that provides two different storylines that will very oppositely affect political dynamics: a dystopian community and a utopian community. When choosing to go down a path, you are presented with an intricate setting and from there, you will make many decisions as a “player” to see what politics would look like from the voter’s perspective in the absolute best and worst case scenario to better understand the current situation we operate in.
Explorable Explainer
We ultimately decided to combine the two ideas presented in the wireflows and landed at creating interactive storylines in which players are presented with real-life scenarios and then will make decisions that will help them better understand the lives of marginalized voters in everyday situations.
Click the website below to be taken to our explainer!
After feedback on our first prototype, we switched the narrative to be in the second person, as opposed to the third, as seen in the final iteration. This was done to help the reader be able to actually feel like they are in this character’s shoes and making their decisions, as opposed to simply reading a story. Along with this, we wanted to evoke emotions with the storyline, as opposed to telling the reader how they should be feeling to persuade them to really make their own personalized decisions in each step of the storyline.
Usability Testing on Explorable Explainer
We had the opportunity to run usability tests for our explorable explainer on three classmates and received feedback on ways we could improve it. We made a few design changes such as having the text be left-centered to give it the familiarity of being read as a story. We also changed the colors of the clickable text to match the colors of our website. This was done because a big critque given was that when the user went back to a page where a clickable text had been clicked before, its color would change; this confused the users, so the color now stays the same.
Another major design change is the background. We originally had an old — almost mid-evil time looking — book page as our background with the intention to give the explainer the feeling of a storybook. However, in our usability testing, we learned that this was not actually effective and instead gave the feeling of being outdated. We ended up changing the background color to white to keep it clean and simple and continue to match the websited design. With this change, however, the undo button is no longer as noticible, but the Twine software does not allow us to change its color. Overall, Twine has several limitations that prevented us from going above and beyond with our explorable explainer, but we hope the simplicity helps to further convey its purpose well.
Summary
Voting in the United States is a complicated process for any citizen, but it is unfairly and disproportionately more difficult for marginalized voters due to states and political parties wanting to discourage them from persisting in casting their ballot. Through our explainer, we want to emphasize the many struggles different types of suppressed voters have to overcome and how there are times where they do give up, as any person would, because it is an extremely (and unnecessarily) taxing process that will appear to not be worth it in some instances. However, their votes would make a difference if a greater percentage of marginalized voters were able to participate in elections. Not only should there be more resources to help these individuals throughout their voting journey, but there should also be better accessibility for these resources. If more people were informed of their experiences, there will be more advocacy for these initiatives to help them.
Citations
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Haygood, Ryan P. “The Past as Prologue: Defending Democracy Against Voter Suppression Tactics on the Eve of the 2012 Elections.” Rutgers L. Rev. 64 (2011): 1019.
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Scher, Richard K. The Politics of Disenfranchisement: Why is it So Hard to Vote in America?: Why is it So Hard to Vote in America?. Routledge, 2015.
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