Ballot Design Still Matters

By Lawrence Norden – 11/10/09

[Reprinted with permission from http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/archives/ballot_design_still_matters/]

We've devoted a number of blog posts to the effects of poor ballot design, whether on touch-screens or paper ballots. In fact, we've collected a fairly large amount of data to make the case that bad design may be the single biggest cause of lost votes in recent elections.

Last week's election presents more evidence, if any was needed, of the potentially disenfranchising effects of poor design. As a political blog in Seattle noted, a poorly-designed ballot probably caused as many as 40,000 King County voters to miss a property tax State Ballot Initiative.  As you can see from this picture of the ballot:


 
The contest was placed immediately below the instructions and to the left of all other contests -- very easy for voters to miss. What can election officials do to avoid these kinds of mistakes in the future? Well, one thing is to use design checklists, like those provided by the Design for Democracy and the Brennan Center. But I'm not sure that in this case, either of those checklists would have alerted officials in King County to the problem. (While both checklists emphasize the importance of consistency in presentation -- and having all contests except one to the right of the instructions is certainly inconsistent -- I'm afraid this direction would have been too general to provide sufficient warning for many officials).

And while it's easy, in retrospect, to say this problem should have been obvious, I don't think that's fair. Such problems are almost never obvious beforehand. Election officials and others working on forms are usually on tight deadlines, trying to get the ballots to fit into limited space and ensuring that everything and every name is correct. Even if they are only focused on how a design might confuse voters, they are often so familiar with the design that they're blind to problems; for the very same reason that it's often so difficult to spot one's own typos.


What probably would have alerted officials to this problem ahead of time, and at little or no cost, would have been a simple usability test: observing ten or fifteen King County citizens as they "voted" on the ballot before the design was finalized. This solution is simple, easy and cheap. The Usability Professionals Association has a great explanation of how it's done.

If county officials watched a dozen people fill out the ballot, at least a couple might have accidentally skipped the ballot initiative. And, with that, officials would have been alerted to the fact that their ballot contained a serious flaw.

The ballot eventually got it's usability test, of course...but on Election Day. And approximately 40,000 voters showed -- a little too late -- that this particular ballot design failed.

London : 21 January 2010 : Election Ballot Usability with Clare Barnett and Caroline Jarrett

The UKUPA is proud to announce our first 2010 event with a very timely look at a usability study carried out on online voting for the UK Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission was concerned about whether the design of ballot papers was making it difficult for electors to vote accurately. Spurred by this, the Electoral Commission commissioned User Vision and Effortmark to conduct usability tests with a range of voters in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In their talk, Clare and Caroline will provide insight on how they approached the project and what they learned:

About ballots:

* What makes voting hard or easy
* How details of design affect the task success of voting

About running a paper testing project across four countries:

* Offline and online testing, differences and similarities
* How we analysed the results

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About the speakers:

Clare Barnett of User Vision is a usability consultant who graduated with an MA in psychology and politics. She spent 10 years in financial services as a Web designer championing usability, then moved to do usability full time.

Caroline Jarrett of Effortmark is a usability consultant who specialises in forms, paper and web. She is co-author of "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability" and "User Interface Design and Evaluation".

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Date: Thursday 21st January 2010
Time: 6.30pm for 7pm start
Location: LBi, Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London, E1 6RU

Register via our Eventbrite http://ukupaeventjanuary2010.eventbrite.com/

There is no charge for UPA members. For non-members the cost is £10, and for student non-members £5 - payable at the door.

AIGA launches online election design gallery

 

As AIGA's Design for Democracy turns into a volunteer-run project (as UPA's Usability in Civic Life is), Jessica Hewitt, who was the AIGA staff point person on the project for the last few years, has headed up a couple of important efforts that demonstrate recent progress in election design.

Design for Democracy's seminal project for the Election Assistance Commission completed in 2007 generated evidence-based and beautiful design specifications for effective layout and design of optical scan ballots, signs, and other election administration materials. Those have been posted on the AIGA web site for some time.  In addition to the report of best practices, anyone can download templates and graphics files.

Now that the design best practices have trickled down to the county level, the project has been collecting examples of how they've been implemented. Interestingly, though the design best practices were developed mainly for ballots and signage, local elections officials have successfully applied the salient parts (along with usability testing) in ingenious ways to voter registration forms, voter information pamphlets, ballot inserts, posters, and other print and online materials. Jessica Hewitt and Amy Vainieri present many of them on the AIGA web site in its Election Design Gallery, another great resource for local elections officials as well as professional designers working in elections.

Want to work on ballot design? Read these first.

As AIGA's Design for Democracy project moves into a new phase, we can celebrate their work on research and design guidelines for ballots and election materials. Elections all over the US are smoother and more voters are able to vote as they intend than ever before because of this work. Well done, people!

Let's continue this good work.

Whenever I speak to designers about design in voting and elections, one of the first questions I get is, "Why is it so damn hard to get to a ballot that is easy to use?" As with many design problems, this one is more complicated than you might think. As with other design problems, there are business and technology constraints. There is also history, culture, and momentum. In addition, there are local laws that also affect design of ballots and election materials.

And so, Design for Democracy has put together a top 10 pointers for designers who want to work in the election space.

Special thanks to Jessica Friedman Hewitt, who has been AIGA's lead on the D4D project. 

Top 10 guidelines for creating a plain language ballot

In June 2009, Ginny Redish and Dana Chisnell presented the findings from research they did for NIST on the language of instructions on ballots at the Usability Professionals' Association conference. In addition to their many fascinating findings, they distributed a handout with quick tips for creating and presenting plain language instructions for ballots. Here they are: 



What to say and where to say it

1. At the beginning of the ballot, explain how to vote, how to change a vote, and that voters may write in a candidate.

2. Put instructions where voters need them. For example, save the instructions on how to use the write-in page for the write-in page.

3. Include information that will prevent voters from making errors, such as a caution to not write in someone who is already on the ballot.


How to say it

4. Write short sentences.

5. Use short, simple, everyday words. For example, do not use "retention" and "retain." Use "keep" instead. For another example, use "for" and "against" for amendments and measures rather than "accept" and "reject."

6. Write in the active voice, where the person doing the action comes before the verb.

7. Write in the positive. Tell people what to do rather than what not to do.

8. When giving people instructions that are more than one step, give each step as an item in a numbered list. Do not number other instructions. When the instructions are not sequential steps, use separate paragraphs with bold beginnings instead of numbering.


What to make it look like

9. Keep paragraphs short. A one-sentence paragraph is fine.

10. Separate paragraphs by a space so each paragraph stands out on the page.

- From Redish, Chisnell, Newby, Laskowski, and Lowry, Use of Language in Ballot Instructions, NIST IR 7556.

To see all 28 guidelines, go to http://vote.nist.gov/NISTIR-7556.pdf. The guidelines are the last appendix in the report, pages 189-190. 

Ballot Design Issue Causes Major Under-Vote in King Co. Washington

A blog post at  the horsesass.org blog published on November 11, 2009 brought attention to a surprising result on a ballot measure in King County's election held a week earlier.

David Goldstein of horsesass.org writes that, "forty-some thousand King County voters … were disenfranchised due to our state’s wholly inadequate ballot design and review procedures" because the ballot measure appeared on the ballot below the instructions in the left hand column.

It is a heavily researched and tested best practice in ballot design to put instructions for marking a printed optical scan ballot in the top left column on the first ballot page. Typically, this leaves a blank space beneath. Unfortunately, it's extremely tempting to fill that space, and election officials in King Co. did.

Although Washington State has been among the most progressive in implementing good ballot design practices, and in having local elections officials usability test ballots and other forms, King Co. tested after ballots had been sent out to voters. Their test revealed the problem that otherwise well-trained officials had missed, leaving them to expect a large under-vote on the measure. That’s exactly what happened. By the estimate of the state election director, Nick Handy, the undervote was somewhere nearer 50,000 votes.

The measure failed statewide by a large margin. If the measure had passed by 5,000 or so votes, this burp in King Co. would likely have tripped a recount because the 2-1 vote against in King Co. could have changed the result.

Goldstein of horsesass.org goes on to laud the Brennan Center's recommendation in their Better Ballots report that counties conduct usability testing before ballots are final using the guidelines and kit developed by UPA's Voting and Usability Project.

Trends in design issues in voting and elections

The elections track at IACREOT was geek heaven. I don’t mean just for election wonks like me, but also for anyone who cares about technology at all. The International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Elections Officials, and Treasurers (IACREOT) was in Spokane, Washington July 7-11.

A few themes ran through the panel discussions. I would argue that they all have design and usability components that need attention:

• Voter registration (databases)
• Military and overseas voting (email, Internet, encryption, troop security)
• The current Holt bill in Congress (proposes replacing all direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines with paper or optical scan voting systems)

Trend 1: Voter registration forms and databases

As the elections world chips away at solving problems in local jurisdictions such as security and managing recounts, more difficult problems arise to be solved. There was much discussion about creating a national voter registration database. Creating and maintaining such a database would solve problems with people being registered in multiple states and voting more than once in federal elections. This doesn’t happen a lot, but it would smooth operations in every single state in managing voter registration. In one session, a panel of elections officials from countries outside the US talked about (among other things) how they register voters and where the data comes from to maintain the voter registration databases. For example, in Canada, the Quebec provincial elections authority that is charged with overseeing elections to parliament maintains address and other personal information for voters (in Canada, they’re called electors), by getting feeds from the provincial socialized healthcare databases, which are constantly being updated by citizens themselves.


Trend 2: Military and overseas voting

With hundreds of thousands of troops actively engaged in conflicts, getting ballots to voters in the military and getting those ballots counted is an extremely difficult problem. For military personnel on bases that are not in war zones, it is somewhat easier; electronic means are available, such as faxes, to send ballots back to local jurisdictions, which can then be duplicated and scanned to be counted. But in war zones, some troops are in such sensitive situations, they only know each other’s first or last names. Finding these troops, getting them their ballots, and then finding ways for them to return their voted ballots that is timely, secure, and secret is a huge problem.


Trend 3: Holt bill on replacing voting systems (again)

It was the consensus of consultants and think-tank types that the bill that Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) has proposed will not only not be passed, but will probably never reach the floor for a vote, mainly because there are so many other, very important problems with Congress to deal with, and frankly, because the other Democrats who would back it have got what they wanted: a Democratic president and legislature.



Creativity and innovation abound in the elections world
Though attendance was lower this year than last year at IACREOT, there were plenty of stories of creative approaches to dealing with the complexities of voter registration and military and overseas voting. Many counties are trying combinations of new technologies in small experiments to make administration easier, but also to make it easier for voters to vote, no matter where they are in the world. In the meantime, they're looking for design guidance. What's the best voter registration form? How does that transfer to an online form? Many interesting design problems to be worked on.