Monday, September 29, 2008

Designing For Democracy

Can graphic designers help save our democracy? The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) seems to think so. And I happen to think they’re onto something.

Since the dramatic events in Florida during the presidential election in 2000, IT people have been working on developing systems to count votes more quickly and accurately, but there are still plenty of confusing ballot designs in use today.

That’s because each county designs its own ballot, and I suspect most jurisdictions don’t have a talented graphic designer available to guide them.

The AIGA recently created an interesting “before and after” presentation – taking a fairly poor ballot design and redesigning it to make some fundamental improvements.

Here’s a picture of the “before” ballot – evidently one that was used in the 2004 presidential election. (Click image to enlarge)

AIGA identified several problems with this design:

First, even the design professionals recognized the confusing language.

“VOTE FOR NOT MORE THAN ONE (1)”? That instruction isn’t very easy to parse, and why would it apply to a judicial election where you vote either to retain or remove? And why the use of the overly verbose use of “one” and “1”? People know what the number “1” is. It doesn’t really need to be spelled out.

Also note this warning:

This language is confusing—advising the voter to “stop,” when in reality, there’s another page to the ballot. “Continued next page” would be more helpful (and so would an arrow).

Another problem with this ballot is the confusing page design. Note here that the bottom of the first column has a bunch of candidates for the US Senate:

But at the top of the next column, there’s an “orphan” candidate.

Admittedly, William Bollman of the Green Party probably wasn’t going to win, but would you like your name there – separated from all the other candidates?

Finally, the text, specifically the ballot question, is notoriously difficult to read. Large passages of text should almost always be set in upper and lower case. And is it necessary for the text to be so long?

Now to the solutions. Here’s what AIGA proposes as a replacement for this ballot. Notice the clean, clear, and crisp design that makes excellent use of a second color to help voters navigate the ballot. There are no “orphan” candidates in this layout. (Click image to enlarge).

Here’s a friendly graphic shows how to fill in the ovals:

Notice the clear language that tells you how many candidates to vote for:

Here you can see that the ballot question has been summarized to make voting easier. And look, there’s that arrow I wanted!

There’s an interactive version of this presentation at the New York Times web site.

I hope local election commissions around the country take note of this design. What would be even better is to pass a federal law that standardizes ballot design. They did that with nutrition labels about 20 years ago – and I happen to think that how we vote is as important as how we eat.

Posted by Richard Bloch

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