Civic Design

2011-11-08T14:06:00.001-08:00

This blog has moved to www.civicdesigning.org.

Kavanaugh bill in NY state assembly would make ballots easier to read and use

2011-06-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

Add your comments to a posting on the web site for WNYC's radio show, "It's a Free Country," that presents a proposed redesign for the New York ballot.

The Brennan Center for Justice worked with Design for Democracy and the Usability in Civic Life project to develop an updated best practice ballot design that takes into account the particularities of voting in New York state.

On the show, which aired on June 9, 2011, New York state assemblyman Brian Kavanaugh and Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice discuss how important design is to successful voting and elections. On the show, Larry runs through the proposed design improvements and why they'll make a difference. There are images of a redesigned ballot on the site, as well, and the show invites your comments.

New York voters have had a rough time transitioning from the mechanical lever machines they used to vote for 50 years to a new, paper-based optical scan voting system in the fall of 2010. Ballot design issues have a ripple effect. They frustrate voters, confuse election workers, and can make recounts complicated. All voters are affected by poor ballot design. We urge New York to pass the Kavanaugh bill.

Hear the show and comment here: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/its-free-country/2011/jun/09/designing-clearer-ballot/

Plain language is indispensable

2011-05-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

On October 13, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Plain Writing Act of 2010. This is no small thing. Have you seen legislation and government documents, lately? The Act calls for writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and consistent with best practices for the subject or field and the intended audience.

Seems simple enough. To ensure that everyone is clear about plain language, the President issued a memorandum that provides guidance to heads of executive departments and agencies on implementing the Plain Writing Act. The six-page memo walks the talk -- that is, it lays out a phased approach for ensuring that Federal communications are clear and plain.

I think we can all agree that getting straightforward information from the government is desirable. But plain language is fundamental to the success of civic design. When communications are simple and plain, it is much more likely that citizens will know about the benefits they're entitled to -- and that they will be able to enjoy those benefits. Imagine what it would be like if everything from Social Security reports and letters from the Veterans Administration (both of which have been doing a beautiful job with plain language for years), to trademark applications, to government contracts, to instructions on ballots -- were clear and simple.

What a world this would be.

One of my favorite parts of the memorandum explains that each agency must have a page on their website explaining how they are meeting the requirements of the Act.

Download the entire memorandum PDF here.

The slides are up! SxSW and EVN feature sessions on ballot design

2011-03-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot of talk about ballot design and usability testing in places you might not otherwise expect to see it. It’s been exciting to see a growing interest in civic design from everyone from geeks to advocacy groups.

I organized a panel at South by Southwest Interactive with Ric Grefe (AIGA), Larry Norden (Brennan Center) and a Dana Debeauvoir (Travis County Clerk) that not only had a great audience, but made the local papers.

The slides from that talk are available for download.

At a conference called EVN in Chicago where election advocacy groups, local elections officials, and others have met for the last seven years, I was delighted to be on a panel that Whitney Quesenbery put together about working with local elections officials. Our star panelist, Jenny Greeve, was AIGA fellow in Washington State for 2 years. We emphasized that design and testing matters in elections, and the audience seemed to see the appeal. The presentation slides are available here: Dana’s ~ Whitney’s ~ Jenny’s.

Top 10 Ballot Design Principles

2011-03-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

Design for Democracy, a project of AIGA, observed hundreds of voters using dozens of variations of designs for ballots over two years of research for the Election Assistance Commission. The results formed the basis of a beautiful design specification for ballots and other election materials that the EAC published in 2006. Below are the top 10 guidelines that came out of that report.

Use lowercase letters. It’s easier to read mixed case and sentence case text than it is to read all uppercase text.

Avoid centered text. Centered text is for wedding invitations and wine labels. Left justified text makes it easier to identify the beginnings of new sentences, assisting skimming.

Pick one sans-serif font. Serif type faces feature tiny strokes at the ends of characters that may make text more difficult to read. The font used in this blog is Helvetica, which has no serifs – and is thus a sans serif font – and is similar to the recommended typeface for ballots and forms.

Use big enough type. Research shows that 12-point type for print is highly readable by most people. On a computer screen, type should be at least 3 mm high. It is possible to use type that is too large for the purpose. Using 16-point or larger type for printed ballots may be too large.

Support process and navigation. Voters make their way through a ballot in a particular way, whether it is a print ballot or an electronic one. The design of the ballot needs to reflect how voters expect to use it. It also needs to prompt behavior in the right places. For example, instructions for turning over a printed ballot to vote both sides should be at the bottom of the right hand column.

Use clear, simple language. Avoid election jargon such as “partisan.” Use active voice, and cast instructions positively rather than negatively.

Use accurate instructional illustrations. Using simple, clear illustrations that show clearly how to mark a ballot assists all voters, but especially helps low literacy voters.

Use informational icons (only). Some US jurisdictions include icons or symbols on the ballot for each party. However, such icons have been found to be distracting and confusing on ballots. Voters are more likely to make mistakes on ballots that include party icons. Icons should only be used to signal something the voter should pay specific attention to, such as special instructions or system warnings.

Use contrast and color functionally. Using color judiciously, consistently, and for specific conventions can help voters find their way through the ballot. For example, shading and contrast can be used effectively on print ballots to set one contest off from the next. In electronic voting systems, color can call out voters’ selections; designate forward or backward progress through a ballot; or under- or overvotes.

Decide what’s most important. When all of the text on a ballot looks the same, it can be difficult for the voter to identify what she should do and how to do it. Create a visual hierarchy that clearly sets out the different elements of the ballot design and supports voters’ voting activities.

Why is it so hard to produce a usable, well-designed ballot?

2011-03-07T13:36:00.000-08:00

This form changed the world.

Miami-Dade presidential ballot from 2000, the "butterfly ballot"

The picture is of the so-called "butterfly ballot" from Miami-Dade County from the presidential election in 2000. It is called a "butterfly ballot" because of how the candidates for this office flow over onto the second page of a two-page spread. The designer of this punch card ballot wanted to make the type large enough for her overwhelmingly older voting constituency. This caused the contest to flow to two pages. That caused the candidates to interlace across the two-page spread. The holes are meant for every other one to the left or every other one to the right. There are horizontal rules to call out the candidate pairs and arrows to point to the holes. If you use trifocals, and you're in a garage with bad lighting, or a high school gym where there's a lot of glare on the page, how might the alignment go for you? Also, it isn't hard to imagine a voter poking the first hole for the first candidate on the left. Then you must poke the second hole for the second candidate - right?

This intentional-but-ill-informed design caused people to vote in ways they had not intended. It caused enough voters to make mistakes that it changed the outcome of a federal election. Which, because this election happened in the US and it was to elect the president, changed the world. This is not unlike the butterfly of the Chaos Theory.

Democracy is a design problem

Whenever I tell people that I work in voting and election design, I get two questions. The first is, So, is there money to be made there? (No.) The second question is, Why is this so complicated?

The people who ask the second question usually have an answer to offer me, already. The solution, they say, is that there should be one voting system for the whole country. This would impose consistency that could be supported with standards, testing, and enforcement. But it isn't that simple.

By tradition, running elections falls to the states and counties by virtue of the 10th amendment to the US Constituion, which says that anything that isn't covered in the Constitution falls to the people. It is considered a "states' rights" issue. All the Constitution says about elections is that there will be such to elect people to offices. Later amendments say who can vote (15th - barring discrimination based on race or color; 19th - womens' suffrage; 24th - eliminating the requirement to have paid income taxes; 26th - establishing 18 years as the legal voting age). Nothing says anything about who determines what system to use. It falls to the states.

The multiplicity of voting systems is just one tiny slice of this wicked problem. As with other design problems, there are constraints. In the case of ballot design, there are several that interact:

Voting technology is a moving target, so standards and best practices always lag.

Election management systems are reprehensibly difficult to use. EMSs, into which databases of candidate filings and questions or measures must be poured to make ballots are so difficult that many county election officials just send their databases in to their voting system vendors to do the ballot layouts for them.

Design specifications and language for instructions are embedded in county and state election legislation. Type font, weight, and size, grid, and position of instructions are often specified in state election code. Election regulations also often include the exact wording of instructions. It's not uncommon for the instructions to have been written generations ago, in negative, threatening, passive voice.

Election directors are excellent public administrators but they're not trained designers. In most of the 3,000 or so counties in the US, the people who run elections are county clerks or registrars who handle vital records such as birth certificates. Most are women, who, on average have held that job for 20 years. They usually are not tech savants, but they don't fear tech, either. They are busy, burdened, and budgetless. Elections have become more and more complicated to administer. Even if they could use InDesign to lay out their ballots, they're not trained designers. For many, a "usable" ballot is one that can be counted accurately by the voting system. And they want to keep costs as low as possible. Printing, mailing, upgrades, bug fixing, translations, storage -- all this costs money.

Ballot templates are issued at the state level. It is typical for the secretary of state, as the head of elections, to issue what's called a "ballot template" for state and federal elections. These also come from people who aren't trained designers and don't take into account the things that can happen when county and municipal contests are added to the ballot. They might not make room for multiple languages. They rarely put ballots through usability testing before live testing on Election Day.

Municipal and county districts overlap to create what are called "ballot styles." For example, there are places in Washington State where you could possibly have a unique ballot. There -- as in many voting jurisdictions throughout the US -- many lower level contests are included in the ballot, from school board to cemetery commission. The boundaries for those districts have been drawn in dozens of different ways. The right combination could draw a circle around your house. And yet, the county election official must ensure that you get to vote on exactly the contests you are entitled to. For this reason, some counties end up generating hundreds of ballot styles as different levels of districts overlap.

Poor ballot design affects the outcome of elections

When ballots are badly designed, voters get frustrated. People lose confidence in elections. Supporting elections on Election Day becomes difficult for poll workers.

All voters are affected by poor ballot designs. Older voters, first time voters, some minorities, and voters who have less education are very likely to make mistakes that prevent them from voting as they intend. Even white, wealthy, educated voters make mistakes on ballots. That's what happened in 2000.

Although the butterfly ballot became the emblem for bad ballot design, we continue to see ballot design problems, both in paper ballots and on electronic touch screen systems. Technology has introduced more design problems. It has not solved them.

Voting: the 233-year-old design problem
There are best practice guidelines, commissioned by the US Election Assistance Commission from AIGA's Design for Democracy project, that are evidence-based. Voting system manufacturers are gradually supporting more and more of the guidelines, as local election officials demand it. States are updating election code to loosen design requirements. Local election officials embrace these changes. Although change can be difficult, these particular changes can make the jobs of local election officials easier because the voter's franchise is more likely to be protected with every design improvement.

Design can change the world. This is our superpower. We can affect the accuracy and accessibility of elections. But there aren't nearly enough people who are interested in civic design. Join the movement at the most important panel in the Free World, at South by Southwest in Austin on Monday, March 14 at 3:30 Central time. (Follow #uxvote on Twitter.) There we'll have on hand Dana Debeauvoir, county clerk from Travis County, Texas with Ric Grefe, the executive director of AIGA and the Design for Democracy project, along with Larry Norden, a civil rights lawyer and senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. I'll be moderating. See you there. And at poll worker training for the next election.

Guidelines for a Plain Language Ballot

2011-03-03T14:46:00.000-08:00

These guidelines are based on the results of an empirical study comparing a ballot with traditional language instructions (Ballot A) to a ballot with plain language instructions (Ballot B).

Voters were more accurate voting the ballot with plain language instructions. Voters preferred the ballot with plain language instructions by a wide margin (82%).

What to say and where to say it

Be specific. Give people the information they need.
At the beginning of the ballot, explain how to vote, how to change a vote, and that voters may write in a candidate.
Put instructions where voters need them. For example, save the instructions on how to use the write-in page for the write-in page.
Include information that will prevent voters from making errors, such as a caution to not write in someone who is already on the ballot.
On an electronic voting system, never have a page with only a page title (such as the Ballot A page that just said Non-partisan offices).
Make the page title the title of the office (State Supreme Court Chief Justice rather than Retention Question).
Have voters confirm that they are ready to cast their vote with a Cast Vote button, not a Confirm button.
At the end, tell people that their vote has been recorded.

How to say it

Write short sentences.

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."

Do not use voting jargon ("partisan" "non-partisan") unless the law requires you to do so. If the law requires these words, work to change the law. Instead refer to contests as "party-based" and "non-party-based."

Address the reader directly with "you" or the imperative ("Do x.").

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

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

Put context before action, "if" before "then." For example, To vote for the candidate of your choice, touch that person’s name.

When you want people to act, focus on verbs rather than nouns. For example, Write in a candidate's name.

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.

Put information in the order that voters need it. Don’t tempt voters to irrevocable actions before explaining the other options.

What to make it look like

Break information into short sections that each cover only one point.

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

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

Do not use italics.

Use bold for page titles.

Use bold to highlight keywords or sections of the instructions, but don’t overdo it.

Keep all the instructions in the left column. Do not put instructions under the choices for a contest.

Do not use all capital letters for emphasis. Use bold. Write all instructions in appropriate upper case and lower case as you would in regular sentences. If the law requires you to use all capital letters, work to change the law.

Use a sans serif font in a readable type size.

These guidelines are part of a report on research commissioned by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The research was conducted by Janice ("Ginny") Redish and Dana Chisnell, with Sharon Laskowski and Svetlana Lowry of NIST. You can download the full report at vote.nist.gov.

Attending South by Southwest Interactive? Come see the most important panel on the program: "Voting: the 233-year-old design problem" with Dana Chisnell, Larry Norden, Ric Grefe, and Dana Debeauvoir, Monday, March 14 at 3:30 pm in 9ABC in the Austin Convention Center. Come say hello!

NY Mayor proposes improvements to voter access, including ballot design

2010-12-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced proposals calling for changes to state election law including allowing early voting. In addition, one proposal would let New Yorkers fill out their ballots at home and take them to a polling site; another will update the registration process and extend the registration period.

What we're most excited about, though, is that the Mayor is proposing simplifying the ballot design with a focus on plain language instructions.

This action is a direct result of talks that the Brennan Center for Justice's Larry Norden and UPA's Usability in Civic Life Project founder Whitney Quesenbery had with the mayor's office about New York's ballot and voting system design.

From the press release:

"Simplified Ballot Design:
Guaranteeing that ballot instructions are readily visible and in plain language will ensure that voters are better able to understand the process. Streamlining the ballot by eliminating unnecessary and uninformative text will make it easier to read."

Story in the New York Daily News

Press release from the mayor's office

ADDED afternoon 7 December 2010: The New York Times has picked up the story.

New York should have piloted their new voting system

2010-11-08T15:00:00.000-08:00

It would have been so easy. So inexpensive. So quiet. Run a mock election, learn some lessons, talk with election officials from other places about how they transitioned from one voting system to another. As Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU remarked on WNYC on November 2, "49 other states have done this before us." But the New York Board of Elections did none of this, and the changing of voting systems seemed to be on the legislative agenda not at all. Instead, the Board and all the counties in New York did the equivalent of live usability testing in the primary in September and November.

New York has known for several years that the state would have to ditch the generations-old mechanical lever machines for new voting systems. There was plenty of time to prepare for this historic transition. And there were plenty of people around who could have helped. Key people offered. And, there are plenty of resources the state board of elections could have tapped. There are evidence-based federal guidelines for election design. There are thousands of experts on changing voting systems across the US. Oh, and there are dozens of local design experts who the state and city boards of elections could have called on.

But none of that happened. Why? For the purposes of narrowing the discussion, let’s just focus on ballot design.

Why the New York ballot is a disaster
While on its face, ballot design seems like a simple thing to do well, it is actually a complex mix of constraints and interactions. There's the fact that the software for creating ballots is usually so difficult to use that many jurisdictions outsource it back to the voting system manufacturer. Next, most people who design ballots are not trained in design, they're trained to be election administrators. Part of that is controlling costs. Local election officials are smart, well intentioned people. But if it comes to deciding between expanding a ballot to two cards to make it easier to read and use, or keeping everything on one card because it saves the county money on printing (and mailing) by making the font smaller and the spacing tighter, many election officials are going to go with smaller, tighter type.

It would be completely unfair to blame the design of the New York ballot on local elections officials, though. In fact, a lot of ballot design is out of control of the local elections official. The responsibility here lies with regulations, history, and bureaucracy. Typefaces and wording for instructions are often specified in election regulations. Community history and norms make up traditions that are embedded in local culture. And, many ballot design decisions are made at the state level, usually without consideration of usability data. Let’s talk about just those factors for a moment.

Some design problems are embedded in legislation
According to New York election law, the ballot must be "full face". That means that everything to be voted on must appear on one side of the ballot. (The November ballot actually violated this; the ballot questions were on the back of the candidate contests.) There's some logic to this, I suppose; New Yorkers have been voting on lever machines for a long time. A major change in the look of the ballot might throw voters off completely. But I doubt that.

In addition, the instructions are legislated in the election code. This is very common across the US. Some states are more flexible on this than others, even though the wording is legislated. New York codified its instructions without regard to the final ballot design. And the final ballot design didn't take into account what the legislated ballot instructions must say. Instruction (2) reads: “To vote for a candidate whose name is printed on this ballot fill in the oval above or next to the name of the candidate.” But the bubbles for candidates appear below the names.

New York sample ballot for November 2010

Tradition also influences ballot design
New York uses fusion voting. That means that although one party nominated a candidate, other parties can endorse a candidate as theirs. For example, on the 2010 midterm ballot, Andrew Cuomo appears as the Democratic candidate for governor, but also as the nominee of the Independence party and Working Families party. If you really want Cuomo to be governor, might you mark him in all three places? That’s called a double vote. But only one counts.

Mechanical lever machines prevent double voting. Officials doubted that voters would make this mistake on paper ballots, but there’s nothing to prevent it happening. In fact in a large usability test on October 9, 2010 sponsored by UPA, AIGA's Design for Democracy project, and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, we found that double voting was not fiction. What about taking away fusion voting to prevent these kinds of voter errors? Fusion voting is legislated, but it is also deeply embedded tradition. Removing the option probably would have devastating effects on smaller but highly active political parties.

Bureaucracy gets in the way
The usability test on October 9 was conducted by a group of concerned volunteers, for free. Why didn’t the New York Board of Elections do a test? This is a mystery. The Brennan Center and UPA offered months ago, but the BOE declined, saying that they had spent all the money they were going to spend on the new systems. And, though the board had been warned about likely problems, the state BOE entered the state primary election in September 2010 in denial. That Election Day clearly showed the predictions of problems to be true, and fusion voting wasn’t even part of the ballot in the primary. In response to appeals for simple, inexpensive remedies, the Board said it was too late to make changes that they said required the voting system to be recertified and too late to make other changes because of how close the November federal election was.

What the design community can do about it
One of the wonderful things about working in election design is how easy it is to affect immediate, positive change. There is a woeful lack of involvement from the design community in election UX. Your country, your state, your town all need you. Here’s what to do:

Meet your local elections officials. Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo are not going to come to you. You have to go to them. Let yourself be known. If you live outside New York County, get yourself to the county election department and introduce yourself. Ask for time with the election director. Ask questions, and then listen. Make yourself available to them without expectation of monetary profit. (There’s very little funding for design and testing in local governments right now.)

Do civic duty. Sure, you vote in every election, but have you ever worked an election? There is so much to learn by being a poll worker about how election administration works and how voters vote. Immersion holds many lessons.

In most communities, there are also citizen advisory committees that work on voter outreach and voter education. When I lived in San Francisco, I was on a committee that wrote summary digests of ballot measures for the Voter Information Pamphlet.

Yes, these things can take time away from work. But what’s more important: a little less income, or doing your part for world peace?

Read the guidelines. There’s a lot of guidance on how to design for elections. You might start with Marcia Lausen’s book, Design for Democracy. It gives a high-level very Design view of ballot design. The Brennan Center’s report, Better Ballots gives 13 case studies that show that specific ballot design elements may have affected election outcomes. AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has compiled a very good collection of tools and resources. Read through what’s there.

Get to know the LEO Usability Testing kit. The Usability Professionals’ Association realized years ago that there weren’t enough usability specialists to test all the ballots out there. What to do? Give local election officials (LEOs) tools for doing testing on their own. The LEO Usability Testing Kit is in wide use in many counties across the US, but it’s also a great tool for volunteers to use to run mock election usability tests.

Make election UX a topic at local community meetings. After you get your feet wet in the election UX world, tell the story to other designers. Have them vote a badly designed ballot and talk about that experience. Encourage them to get involved.

Where the New York ballot is going from here
After a little media attention for sloppy design that might have prevented voters from voting as they intended, counties and states usually get the message. Florida is no longer the poster child for messy elections, Ohio inherited that honor for the 2008 presidential election. Now, its new sibling New York is competing strongly to outdo Ohio. Let’s hope that New York wakes up and reforms its election board and administration.

In the meantime, the New York State Inspector General conducted an investigation of the reported issues with the September 2010 primary. As Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote, "It is remarkably well-written, and it is sinister, sad and comical all at once."

After the primary, the Brennan Center filed a law suit against the New York State Board of Elections, "over a discriminatory New York State policy for counting political party votes under a procedure known as 'double voting.' ... The policy unfairly penalizes both the voters and the minor parties they support." You can read a bit about the suit on the Brennan Center web site.

- Dana Chisnell
The opinions expressed here are Dana's only, and not the officially sanctioned position of UPA.

Voting: The 233-year-old design problem

2010-08-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Whenever I talk about my involvement in voting and elections, whoever I'm chatting with invariably asks:

Why is it so hard to design a good looking ballot that prevents voters from making mistakes?

Why doesn't the whole country use the same voting system?

Design in elections is a wicked problem. And I think designers will be fascinated with learning what the constraints really are. So, I decided to take it to big audience - South by Southwest Interactive 2011. I need your help to get on the program. Please go to the 'panel picker' and vote for my session.

Just to give you a head start, here's the description:

Do you think the "butterfly ballot" was an isolated problem? How did the hanging chad become a world-class design problem? Did you know our 43rd president was chosen because of a decision made about font size? By someone who was not a trained designer? Did you know that the presidential election in 2000 was not the first - or last - time that design problems affected the outcome of an election? If you're trained in design, interested in fair elections, or looking for a way to affect world peace, come to this panel. This is probably the most important panel in the Free World. And we're not kidding.

Please vote Yes, This rocks! before August 27, 2010.

Dear New York, please let me correct my ballot

2010-07-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) Voting and Usability Project and the Brennan Center for Justice are urging the New York State Board of Elections to change the interaction and a message on the state's new voting systems.

Today, the New York Times joined the discussion in an editorial.

The issue: New York is changing from using mechanical lever machines to optical scan ballots. This change is good. However, with New York's particular ways of voting that include cumulative voting, it seems likely that some voters will vote too many times in a given contest. Florida saw some of this with a similar configuration; after some counties changed the system configuration to return overvoted ballots to voters, overvotes went down while the number of ballots cast remained constant.

Right now, the systems are configured to hold the ballot in the tabulator when it detects an overvote or undervote, while showing the voter a message on a small screen.

The message voters get when they mark their ballots for too many candidates on a contest, while the tabulator holds the ballot

This would be remedied by a clear message from the tabulating machine as it pushes the ballot back out for the voter to review and change, if she wants. But these systems hold the ballot while the voter reads a poorly worded message to decide what to do.

The New York State Board of Elections argues that the tabulator returning the ballots automatically will slow voting. The Brennan Center and UPA argue that when the machine holds the ballots, voters are more likely to let the flawed ballot be cast. This means that vote on that contest will not count, which is likely to disenfranchise thousands of voters and call results into question.

Was Alvin Greene picked by voters trying to eliminate errors on their ballots?

2010-06-23T09:55:00.000-07:00

As a post on the Newsweek site pointed out on June 18, usability of a voting system may have influenced yet another election. This time, it's the Alvin Greene victory in the Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina last week. We think it's likely that one particular feature of the user interface may have caused some voters to change their vote: representing undervoted contests on the review screen in red.

Proximity and placement in the ballot could have made a difference

We know that placement in the order of candidates does influence the likelihood of getting votes. (According to Michael Alvarez colleagues at the Voting Technology Project at CalTech, candidates that appeared above and below Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California recall of Gray Davis in 2003 received more votes that they probably normally would have if they'd appeared elsewhere in the list of 150 candidates for governor: http://vote.caltech.edu/drupal/node/26).

Placement in the overall ballot also makes a difference. There is roll-off in later contests mainly because voters don't know much about the candidates that appear lower down on the ballot, such as judges.

Using a computer to vote introduces usability issues with navigating ballots

Using electronic voting systems introduces another layer of usability issues in marking and casting ballots as voters must navigate the ballot differently from how they use a printed, optical scan ballot. All electronic voting systems show a summary review screen at the end of all the contests. It lists all of the contests with the choices the voter made for each. The information is color coded: On most systems a completely voted contest appears blue; an under- or un-voted contest appears red. There is mixed research about how much attention voters pay to this screen. One thing we do know is that some voters are seriously disturbed by the red messages.

In one study, red on the summary screen of an electronic ballot caused some voters to change their votes

In a study that Janice ("Ginny") Redish and I conducted for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2008 (http://www.nist.gov/itl/vote/upload/NISTIR-7556.pdf), we observed that many of our 45 study participants wanted so much to remove the "error" that appeared on the summary review screens for undervoted contests that they sometimes resorted to extraordinary measures to get the system to remove the red entries on their ballot review screens.

The voting system we used in our study behaved similarly to commercially available systems. That is, study participants could select candidates using a touch screen and move forward or back in the ballot by touching appropriate buttons. When they got to the review screen, they could touch the contest they wanted to review or change to go back to it. This is different from the South Carolina system, which forced voters to review undervoted contests before casting the ballot. Although the flow of our system was more straightforward, study participants chose to go back into the ballot to change the red contests to blue.

Some participants voted for candidates they were not otherwise interested in voting for; at least one participant entered blank write-in votes (by going to the write-in for a contest and putting in a blank space) to make the red entries in the review screens turn blue. We observed 17% of our study participants asking questions, expressing concerns, and changing votes because the red color bothered them so much.

-- Dana Chisnell

Ballot Design Still Matters

2010-01-13T07:40:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-06T14:45:00.000-08:00

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

***********************
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".

***********************
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

2010-01-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-12-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-30T08:56:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

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

2009-07-26T21:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Testing ballots: Real names or fictional? Direct how to vote or not?

2009-05-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

How do you design a study to learn about ballot and voting system usability without doing the research during an election? The ideal situation would be to watch over voters’ shoulders on Election Day. But because we prize voting privately in the United States, observing voting on Election Day just is not an option. What’s a researcher to do?

It’s a challenging research situation.

What ballot should be used in the study? Should you use a real ballot from a recent election? What are the tradeoffs there? Next, you have to set up a situation that is similar to Election Day but isn’t. Turns out that making a study a lot like Election Day doesn’t really work for research.

Why researchers use constructed ballots with fictional names

There's a lot of research about whether fictional names are okay in voting studies, particularly by the people at Rice University in the ACCURATE project. They found that fictional names are okay as long as they're realistic. The NIST standard ballot for certification testing uses fictional names. Many researchers have picked up that ballot (or subsets of it) to use in their research.

When you use real names locally, it can be jarring if the design or the format looks different from what participants are expecting, and you instantly have artifacts from that. If there's one thing that does not look like the ballot they used, then voters notice and it's an instant distraction. So why not make the whole thing up?

Most researchers have decided not to use a real ballot from a recent election with. Why not? Using a constructed ballot, with fictional contests, names, and amendments or questions:

avoids asking people to vote in a contest where they might have their own opinions, or where it asks them to reveal their political preferences
levels playing field across levels of political interest
allows constructing a ballot that can be used to test different usability issues in types of contests or tasks

Why researchers tell participants how to vote

Now, why not let study participants vote the way they want to? Why give them a slate to vote or task scenarios to work from?

In usability tests, researchers often ask participants to carry out pre-determined scenarios. Sometimes this is done to measure specific behavior, sometimes to make sure certain things are tested, sometimes to make sure that the facilitator is ready for the next expected thing. Part of the art of conducting a usability study is knowing when to let participants do what they want to do and knowing when to go back to the test design. (In the ideal world, what the participant wants to do and what you want them to do are the same thing.) Researchers in the elections space make this decision consciously and deliberately to make sure that they can collect the data measures that will prove (or not) a hypothesis.

Instructed voting makes it possible to evaluate error rates without directly observing the participant voting. People who study how people use other kinds of technology try to instrument the system to capture test data or observe directly. These things are difficult to do with voting systems. So, instructed voting versus "just vote as you might" asks the participants to be thoughtfully accurate, and not just randomly mark the ballot.

The special challenges of voting research

Researching how people interact with most technology, a researcher can go into the field, hang around where the person is doing what they want to do and ask questions. Election Day is not the time for that. Most voting research requires that the number of variables be limited and those that remain are controlled.
So far, researchers have found that using the NIST standard ballots and directed tasks is the best way to manage that.

-- By Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell

Plain language makes a difference: Voters are more likely to vote as they intend when ballot instructions are simple and clear

2009-04-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

How well do voters and poll workers understand the language of ballots and voting system instructions?

Today the National Institute of Standards and Technology released its report of a carefully controlled quantitative study in which 45 US adults over a range of ages and education levels each voted two ballots that differed only in the wording and presentation of the ballot instructions. The participants also discussed and compared specific pages from the two ballots. Janice (Ginny) Redish, Ph.D. led the study. She found that:

Voters voted more accurately on a ballot with plain language instructions than on a ballot with traditional instructions.

Voters with less education made more errors in voting.

Voters could tell the difference and preferred the plain language ballot by a wide margin.

See the full report here: http://vote.nist.gov/NISTIR-7556.pdf, or go to vote.nist.gov/docmap.htm.

Technology as a solution in 1957: "Behind the Freedom Curtain"

2009-03-01T09:33:00.000-08:00

This 1957 film housed in the Internet Archives in the Prelinger Archives is a tutorial on how mechanical lever machines work -- with a little chauvinistic flag-waving thrown in for good measure. It is very much a period piece (remember HUAC?), but also does a good job of explaining the kinds of mistakes that voters make on paper ballots. The Automatic Voting Machine Co. that made the film makes the case that those mistakes can't be made on the lever machine. See: http://www.archive.org/details/Behindth1957.

Go from that film to the results of a review of the November 2008 election in Florida, where 15 counties switched from direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines to paper, optical scan ballots. Twice as many ballots were rejected in 2008 than were rejected in 2004. But still, the rejection rate was 0.75%, well below the 2.9% in 2000, and below the "expected" residual vote rate of about 1% on average. From the New York Times on February 26, 2009:

The final report sent to state lawmakers showed that 0.75 percent, or 63,680 of the 8.39 million ballots cast in Florida, did not count in the presidential race. Barack Obama defeated John McCain in Florida by more than 236,000 votes. In the presidential race four years earlier, the rate of uncounted ballots was 0.41 percent, equating to about 31,000 votes.

Read the whole New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/us/26florida.html?nl=pol&emc=pola1.

In 2004, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in Florida by 380,978 votes. In 2000, Al Gore received 543,895 more individual votes nationally than George W. Bush, but Bush received more electoral votes. In Florida in 2000, the margin of victory was 0.0092%, in favor of Bush. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2004.)

Ever onward: A hope for continued progress in election reform

2009-01-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

The Bush Administration spurred major election reform in the US. This reform movement included technology, security, and accessibility. It urged improvements in plain language in public documents, transparency in process, and alternative ways and days for voting.

Election reform has resulted in some great things: ability to vote for many who were unable to vote independently before; examination of steps in the process that hadn’t received much attention before, such as recounts and record-keeping; research-based improvements in ballot design – and much more.

But there is more yet to be done. Many voters are disenfranchised – still – by suboptimal design and the lack of usability in election materials they receive, voting machines they use, ballots they mark. Here’s hoping that the new administration continues to see election reform as a priority and continues and expands funding for research sponsored by the federal government that will result in easier, more accurate voting.

-- Dana Chisnell

Note: This post reflects the views of the person who wrote and posted it. It does not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Usability Professionals' Association or its individual members.

Come hear: UPAers on ballot usability, plain language, and evaluating doc for poll workers

2009-01-02T06:09:00.000-08:00

Several of us on the Usability in Civic Life Project at the Usability Professionals' Association will be speaking at events in 2009 on topics that we hope elections officials, design practitioners, and human factors researchers are interested in. The dates, places, events, topic titles, and speakers are listed below.

Date	Place	Event	Topic title	Speakers
Feb 6	Washington, DC	NASED	Usability Testing Ballots	Dana Chisnell
May 3-6	Atlanta, GA	STC	Rewriting the Voting Experience On Election Day	Susan Becker, Ginny Redish, Whitney Quesenbery, Josie Scott, Sarah Swierenga, Dana Chisnell
June 12	Portland, OR	UPA	Improving the User Experience of Voting	Ginny Redish, Dana Chisnell, Sharon Laskowski, Svetlana Lowry
July 7-11	Spokane, WA	IACREOT	Improving the User Experience of Voting	Dana Chisnell
July 19-24	San Diego, CA	HCI International	User Experience in Elections: Poll Workers	Dana Chisnell, Karen Bachmann

Israelis struggle with poor usability

2008-12-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

Israel's Likud party's primary held this week appears to have been a usability fiasco. The new computer interface was so difficult that even party leaders had trouble using it, according to an article in the Jerusalem Post.

Amir Dotan described the system for us. The voters choose 12 candidates from one list, 2 candidates from a second list, and 1 from a third list. But, instead of selecting a name, they have to select the ID number for the candidates they want. No names appear on the ballot, just a list of ID numbers representing all of the candidates. Touch a number, and the name appears in a list. Once the selections are made, a review screen shows the number, name and (sometimes) a picture. The confusion seems to have been a poorly implemented attempt to display all candidates on one screen.

Political opponents accused current leaders of nothing less than "raping democracy" with a difficult-to-use computer system. But the answer is probably simpler than that: they forgot that usability matters. And it matters the most in "mission critical" situations like elections.

Links:

Article in the Jerusalem Post: http://fr.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1228728115482&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Amir Dotan's blog (in Hebrew) www.amirdotan.com/blog

Images and descriptions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitneyq/sets/72157611073610948

Style Guide for Voting System Documentation at NIST

2008-09-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

We've talked here about how important is that instructions for voters be easy to understand. The other key person on Election Day is the poll worker. Poll workers are also users of ballots and voting systems and are often the front line in troubleshooting problems. A new report from NIST provides guidelines for writing voting system documentation. One value of good system manuals is that election officials often use material from them to create poll worker training and voter education -- so usability flows down stream.

Plain Language bill needs your help

2008-09-17T09:56:00.000-07:00

A plain language bill has been working it's way through the US Congress. The bill passed the House several months ago, and we've been working to get the Senate version (S.2291) to the floor for a vote before the end of this session.

We were almost there. Now it's stalled, and we need your help.

We've copied an article below, but Senator Bennett (R. Utah) has blocked the bill on the grounds that it would be a problem for the Federal Election Commission and the Election Assistance Commission. Hmm. We feel a headline coming on: "Clear communication about federal election rules could endanger elections, says US Senator."

There are two simple answers to objections:

1. The law does not apply to regulations

2. Are they really suggesting that information about elections should be hard to understand

Here's how you can help: write or call your Senator, and Senator Bennett's office to express your opinion.

Tip to Whitney Quesenbery for whipping up this call to action.

Now, read the article below:
Utah senator stalls 'plain language' bill

By Terry Kivlan CongressDaily September 15, 2008

A bill mandating the use of "plain language" on government
forms, benefit applications, reports and other documents may languish
this year amid a crowded Senate schedule and an unanticipated hold by
Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah.

The bill would not apply to regulations. It defines "plain
language" as language that "is clear, concise, well organized, and
follows the best practices of language writing."

It would direct the Office of Management and Budget to
issue guidelines for implementing the program within six months and
then monitor compliance among agencies.

In April, the measure cleared the Senate Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Committee on voice vote, while a similar
measure passed the House 376-1.

It was expected to breeze through the Senate just before
lawmakers left town for their summer recess when Sen. Charles
Grassley, R-Iowa, placed a hold on behalf of Bennett.

According to Bennett aides, he was concerned about its
impact on the Federal Election Commission and the Election Assistance
Commission -- both of which fall under the oversight jurisdiction of
the Senate Rules Committee, where he serves as ranking member.

"The FEC in particular is required to interpret campaign
finance law and issue regulations that are often full of legal terms,"
spokeswoman Tara Hendershott said in an e-mail. "These precise terms
may become lost in translation if [the FEC is] required to use
whatever OMB determines is 'plain English.'" Hendershott added that
while Bennett understands the need for clear communication, "he is
concerned about the unintended consequences of this bill."

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, sponsor of the legislation,
expressed disappointment in Bennett's move. The Hawaii senator said in
a statement that his measure "is a good bipartisan bill that would
improve Americans' access to their government," and "deserves an up or
down vote on the floor." Aides to Akaka and Bennett said last week
that they were discussing compromise language for the legislation but
had not reached an agreement.

Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., is not planning to try
to bring up the bill if Bennett will force him to file cloture,
according to a spokesman. But Bennett has come under pressure from
outside Congress. The National Small Business Association sent him a
letter last week asking him release his hold, arguing that the bill
would "not be a mandate" as such, and that it represented a "common
sense approach to saving small business -- and the federal government
-- time, effort and money."

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0908/091508cdpm1.htm

Testing ballots, getting ready for November

2008-09-17T06:46:00.000-07:00

A few of us working on the Usability Professional's Association Usability in Civic Life Project have been working with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU to conduct usability testing of ballots that are being prepared for the November election. See one story here: http://usabilitytestinghowto.blogspot.com/2008/09/usability-testing-in-wild-ballots.html

Palm Beach Post Urges Counties to Make Ballots “Obsession” Based on Brennan Center Report

2008-08-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

A Palm Beach Post editorial published this week urges Palm Beach County to “make ballots their obsession” in an effort to eliminate the problems that have plagued their recent elections history. Palm Beach County was the location of the infamous “butterfly ballot” in 2000. To avoid problems with the punch card ballot, their former elections chiefs ordered and maintained the connect-the-arrow system, on which voters make a greater number of errors, the Brennan Center Report (see post from July 28) shows. The Post calls the systems now in use less reliable, and the connect-the-arrow less intuitive.

They also recall the Sarasota County 2004 ballot, in which the 13^thCongressional district was placed on the same touch screen as the much more visible race for governor. Many more voters failed to vote that race than in a neighboring county, where the race appeared on its own screen. The Post suggests that voters should not be blamed for this failure, because the Sarasota ballot was badly designed.

Although the governor banned electronic voting in the state, the Post notes that nothing has been done to "ban bad ballots.” The Post suggests that simply looking at the ballot from the perspective of a voter would have revealed these issues, and urges the state to place importance on ballot design.

The Post’s suggestion of “viewing the ballot as the voter would” is easily done by using the LEO testing kit. We urge all election officials in every state take some time to review their ballots using the LEO methods before election day.

UPA member Chisnell receives commendation from San Francisco Board of Supervisors for work in plain language and voting

2008-08-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

In a brief ceremony held yesterday in the gorgeous board chambers at San Francisco’s City Hall, UPA member Dana Chisnell was recognized by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors along with four others for work on the City’s Ballot Simplification Committee. Board president Aaron Peskin introduced the committee members during the Board’s regular meeting on Tuesday, saying “Now I’d like to recognize a group that is little known and rarely recognized by the public. The Ballot Simplification Committee writes the summary digests of measures for the Voter Information Pamphlets sent out to voters before each election. For the November election, there are 22 measures on the ballot, the most in San Francisco history. It seemed time to recognize the many hours these people put in to make voting more accessible to San Francisco citizens.”

As Peskin distributed gold-sealed certificates to the committee members, committee chair Betty Packard thanked the Board for the honor and for working with the committee to explain often-complex ballot propositions in simple but accurate language.

The committee was formed by a charter amendment in 1997. The five volunteer members, all communications professionals, work together during public hearings to develop objective, unbiased, plain language summaries 300 to 500 words in length for each measure to appear on the city-county ballot each election. There will have been 5 elections between November 2007 and November 2008 in San Francisco, with a total of 55 measures on the ballot. There will be 22 local measures on the November 2008 ballot.

From left: Chair Betty Packard, Anne Jorgensen, June Fraps, Dana Chisnell, and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin

Photo (c) Bill Klenmens & Susan Becker

UPA member Dana Chisnell was nominated for the Ballot Simplification Committee by the Northern California Media Workers’ Guild and appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2005.

Her commendation from the board reads:

“For playing a vital role in informing San Francisco’s voters about local ballot measures, and for your outstanding endurance and patience in working to make complex legislation understandable to the general public, the Board of Supervisors extends its highest commendation.”

Links:

Ballot Simplification Committee
http://www.sfgov.org/site/elections_index.asp?id=21619

San Francisco City and County Voter Information Pamphlets
http://sfpl.lib.ca.us/librarylocations/main/gic/voterpamp/votepamp.htm

San Francisco Board of Supervisors
http://www.sfgov.org/site/bdsupvrs_index.asp

Call to action: Volunteer to test or be a poll worker

2008-08-11T06:32:00.000-07:00

Much of the content on this blog comes from people on the Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) Usability and Voting Project. We're gearing up now to help local elections officials test their ballots and other election materials for usability for the November election.

Ballots are being defined and designed now. Most have to be completed within a few weeks.

Want to help test ballots for usability? Step up! We'd love to have you. Questions? Write to us at voting@usabilityprofessionals.org.

In the meantime, a few pointers about working on elections.

1. Usability and Voting is non-partisan
First, and most importantly, this is a non-partisan effort. Whatever our personal political beliefs, they stay separate from this work. You can read our ethics guidelines for usability and design professionals on http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/voting/ethics.html

2. Sign up to be a poll worker
We know that it’s hard to find time to volunteer. But there is something that everyone in the US can do that takes just a day (or part of a day) of your time. Sign up to be a poll worker. With record turnout expected this November, new poll workers are needed more than ever to meet the target of 2 million poll workers set by the EAC. To find out how to be a poll worker, contact your local elections office or visit http://www.eac.gov/voter/poll%20workers

3. Volunteer to help your local election officials with usability testing
One way to help ensure that ballots get a good usability test is to volunteer to run the test yourself. If you do:

Please use the LEO Usability Testing Kit. Every election official has received a printed copy of the report, and it would be useful – especially in this first wave -- if we all used the materials they have already been introduced to, and spoke with one voice. Plus, your feedback will help improve the Kit. http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/voting/leo_testing.html
Remember that election officials are in the middle of their busiest, highest pressure work period – final preparations for a highly volatile presidential election. This is a time to offer to help, not offer blame.
Don't be discouraged if they say "not this time" – offer to contact them again in the spring for the off-season elections.
Before you make any recommendations, take a look at the EAC's Best Practices Guidelines for ballot designs as well as the recommendations in the Brennan Center report, Better Ballots. But, don't be surprised if you are told that it "can't be done". Not only do many voting systems have limitations that can get in the way, but elections are governed by state laws and regulations, as well as expectations from current practice. See http://www.eac.gov/election/effective-polling-place-designs and http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/better_ballots/

4. Keep in touch
Let us know if you have any contacts with elections folks. We're trying to keep track of any usability work, so we can get a full picture of the impact of our efforts.

We'll be happy to talk to anyone who is interested, and support them in any way we can. Our goal is to make better design and usability part of every aspect of elections, integrated into the normal processes.

Links:
LEO Usability Testing Kit
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/voting/leo_testing.html

Ethics guidelines for usability and design professionals working in elections
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/voting/ethics.html

Information about being a poll worker
http://www.eac.gov/voter/poll%20workers

EAC Effective Polling Place Designs
http://www.eac.gov/election/effective-polling-place-designs

EAC Election Management Guidelines
http://www.eac.gov/election/quick-start-management-guides

Brennan Center for Justice report Better Ballots
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/better_ballots/

UPA’s Voting and Usability Project
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/voting/
voting@usabilityprofessionals.org.

It comes down to plain language

2008-08-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

The ballot does not stand alone in its importance in an election. It is part – perhaps the center, but still only one part – of a larger “ecosystem” of an election that includes election materials like signs, notices, instructions, and information pamphlets.

This week I’ve been sitting as a member of the San Francisco Ballot Simplification Committee. Oddly, this city-chartered committee isn’t about simplifying ballots. But it does create election materials that complement the ballot: the committee writes digests of measures that are on the ballot. These digests, usually around 300-400 words long, are printed in a voter information pamphlet (VIP). The VIP is mailed to all active registered voters at least 30 days before Election Day.

The original legislation can be from 2 pages (for a voter initiative) to 300 pages (for a school district bond measure) long. Most voters won’t read that material, even though it is reasonably available. In San Francisco, voters have come to rely on the digests of the measures as a source of objective, unbiased, and plain explanations of the ballot propositions.

The basic skeleton is even simple. Each digest has 4 parts:

The way it is now
The proposal
A “yes” vote means
A “no” vote means

Using that outline, the 5 people on the committee work to capture the essence of each measure. See some examples here. A lot of what we do is translating. For example, today we worked on digests for three measures that if passed would change property and business taxes in the City. How do you talk about exemptions? We attempted to simplify to say who would and wouldn’t have to pay. Should we use the word “ceiling” or “limit” to talk about what defines the maximum revenue of a small business? (We chose “limit.”)

Though San Francisco is pretty progressive about drafting legislation that is accessible, terms of art (“budget set-aside”), domain jargon (can you say “total property tax increment funds”?), and purposeful obfuscation do creep in. Our goal is to create a text that is plain enough to understandable by the average 8th grader. Sometimes we succeed.

We’ll be done with the digests for November on Friday, August 8.

Better Ballots lists simple guidelines for making ballots easy to use

2008-07-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

The report that the Brennan Center published on July 21, Better Ballots, lists excellent best practices for making ballots easy to use, including:

Ballot instructions should be brief, simple, and clear.
Don't split contests.
Make sure ballot design is consistent.
Make ballots easy to understand visually.
Give voters maximum flexibility.

Within each of these best practices points, the report lists detailed guidelines that should help local elections officials and vendors implement ballot designs with which voters are more likely to vote as they intend.

Brennan Center recommends usability testing of ballot designs before Election Day

2008-07-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

In the Brennan Center's review of ballot designs and instructions for its report Better Ballots, the task force writing the report found that

hundreds of thousands of voters have been disenfranchised by ballot design problems
there has been little or no federal or state guidance on ballot design that might have been helpful to elections officials who define and design ballots at the local level
usability testing is the best way to ensure that voters can use ballots to vote as they intend

The recommendation to include usability testing in the ballot design process is a major revelation in the election world. The UPA Voting and Usability Project has developed the LEO Usability Test Kit to help local elections officials to do their own simple, quick usability tests of ballot designs.

UPA member Josie Scott trains Ohio elections officials to usability test ballots

2008-07-24T12:25:00.000-07:00

Ohio has experienced dozens of major issues in elections over the last 10 years. Now as part of her efforts at improving elections, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's staff invited UPA's Usability and Voting Project to instruct local elections officials from throughout Ohio on how to use the Project's LEO Usability Test Kit to test their ballot designs before Election Day.

Usability and Voting Project member Josie Scott conducted training in Columbus with about 50 county election officials on July 22 and 23. Josie noted that many local election officials "will be motivated by their situations -- all of them are determined to conduct a much better election than the past few."

Better Ballots: NY Times endorses usability testing in elections

2008-07-24T08:17:00.000-07:00

Today the lead editorial in the New York Times discusses the Brennan Center report on Ballot Design and calls for "Congress [to] require that ballots used in federal elections meet minimum design standards. It should also mandate pre-election usability testing and make funds available for it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/opinion/24thu1.html

UPA Voting and Usability Project members contribute to Brennan Center Better Ballots report

2008-07-23T11:12:00.000-07:00

On July 21 the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law released a report called Better Ballots. The report, which includes contributions by Whitney Quesenbery along with UPA members Dana Chisnell, Caroline Jarrett, Ginny Redish, Josephine Scott, and Sarah Swierenga, illustrates and explains 13 classic ballot design problems that caused serious problems in real elections, including the presidential election in 2000.

Plain Language Passes the House

2008-04-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

A mandate for plain language in federal government communications is one step closer after the US House passed the Braley Plain Language bill last week. While this may not directly require plain language in voting materials and ballots, it certainly strengthens our argument.

A similar bill, S 2291, has moved out of committee into the full Senate.

More information: http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3479845

UPA Testifies at EAC Roundtable: Usability , Access, Plain Language

2008-03-31T19:46:00.000-07:00

UPA’s Usability in Civil Life Project made another contribution to the national conversation about usability and accessibility in voting last week. Two members of the project gave testimony to the Election Assistance Commission at their Usability and Accessibility roundtable discussion regarding the Technical Guidelines Development Committee’s (TGDC) recommended voluntary voting system guidelines (VVSG). The event was held at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC.

Usability in Civic Life director Whitney Quesenbery presented testimony that ties accessibility to accessibility in voting systems.

“It takes access plus usability to provide accessible usability to all,” she said in written testimony.

UPA Voting and Usability project member Josephine Scott attended for Karen Bachmann, User Experience manager at the Society for Technical Communications. Josie advocated the adoption of plain language for all voting materials: ballots, instructions, polling materials and poll worker documentation to simplify voting.

“Using plain language helps bring clarity to an inherently complex activity,” she wrote.

More information:
UPA Usability and Civic Life Project: http://www.upassoc.org/civiclife/
The Election Assistance Commission: http://www.eac.gov
Whitney’s Testimony: Connecting Usability and Accessibility in Elections
Josie’s Testimony: Plain Language: Adding Simplicity to Voting

American Idol or Vote by Mail for Florida?

2008-03-15T17:49:00.000-07:00

Elections seem to be under attack from both sides: the concerns about being able to prevent computer tampering run squarely up against our desires to have everything be fast, easy and high-tech.

A few days ago, a friend asked why we couldn’t run elections like American Idol. After all, the television show collects votes from some 500 million viewers, compared to a mere 122 million votes in the 2004 presidential elections. Do a quick web search, and you’ll find many blog posts wondering the same thing. Of course American Idol allows you to “vote early and vote often” – something frowned-on in political elections.

We may not be ready for American Idol-style phone voting, but Florida is wondering why it can’t use all-postal balloting to re-run its Democratic primary. After all, Oregon and Washington State have been doing this for years and seem to have a system that works well. It eliminates much of the cost, and they might avoid the problems with new systems that have plagued Florida in recent years.

Is it really that easy? An article in the New York Times, “For Florida, Warnings of Complexity of Mail-In Voting” looks at some of the issues. Nick Handy, director of elections for Washington and John Lindback, director of elections for Oregon both have a long list of questions about whether an all-postal election could be planned in “Internet time”, pointing out that their procedures have been refined over the course of 20 years.

We put a lot of store in the opinions of these two election directors. John Lindback worked with AIGA’s Design for Democracy project to redesign the ballots, election information, and the materials used by election workers as they process the ballots. Nick Handy brought UPA’s Dana Chisnell to Washington to train local election officials to usability test ballots. We wish more election officials would take the time to include good design and usability testing in their plans. Elections are complicated enough without worrying about whether voters can use the ballot correctly.

For Florida, Warnings of Complexity of Mail-In Voting
By William Yardley, Published March 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/us/politics/15mail.html

Design for Democracy http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/design%2Dfor%2Ddemocracy

Progressive Washington State: Training local elections officials to usability test ballots
http://ballotusability.blogspot.com/2007/05/
progressive-washington-state-training.html

Ohio Officals Test Ballots for Weather But Did They Test for Design Problems?

2008-03-01T20:12:00.000-08:00

National Public Radio reports that Ohio election officials are braced for the worst because they have been asked to implement a new optical scan system in an impossibly short time frame (two months.) To prevent disaster, some local officials even left ballots out in the damp, tore them, spilled coffee on them, all in a effort to make sure that their equipment will handle all possible voting conditions.

In one of the most populous counties, Cuyahoga County, a locus of problems with touch screen systems in the past, officials were not able to deploy enough optical scan counters for every precinct. They will implement a complicated central count process that will involve halting precinct voting and transporting ballots to the central count location during the voting day, NPR reports.

All of this complexity has election officials working double overtime to make sure things work smoothly for the closely-watched Tuesday primary.

Unfortunately, we do not have evidence that officials have asked real people to test these ballots to make sure that a ballot design flaw does not cause them problems later. The article does not mention any attempt to make certain that the ballots do not have some hidden flaw like the unnecessary “extra box” on primary ballots in Los Angeles County that may be responsible for thousands of spoiled ballots. (See Ballots Not Counted in LA Primary Because "Extra Box" Not Marked, Feb. 8).

Election officials should be concerned. We know that voters will not have the benefit of feedback they would get when the counter rejects a ballot that has an error. Voters will not get a second chance to correct their mistakes. If there is a hidden problem -- one that might have been revealed and fixed by usability testing -- state and local election officials will be under fire once again.

We hope we are wrong; we welcome any news that election officials tested the ballot not just for accuracy and poor voting conditions, but for vote-ability. We also hope that voters understand the instructions, are able to vote the ballot properly, and have their vote counted with confidence.

Usability testing is one way to help ensure that confidence.

More information http://www.npr.org/templates/story/
story.php?storyId=87809221&ft=1&f=1012

Poll Worker Training Blamed for Voting Snafus

2008-02-26T17:35:00.000-08:00

Proof that plain language requirements apply especially to pollworker materials and training:

The Associated Press ran a story this week about the number of polling problems that can be attributed to poor poll worker training. The snafus include hiding electronic voting machines because the workers did not like them; handing out the pens used for touch screens to mark paper ballots and calling them "invisible ink pens." Poll workers have provided wrong information - especially about this year's spate of confusing primaries - and inadvertently disenfranchised voters.

The story notes the concerns of the League of Women Voters, whose researcher, Lloyd Leonard, notes that we are "running the most important part of our democracy on the backs of untrained, poorly paid volunteers." Some two million pollworkers form the largest one-day work force, according the Pew Center on the States. Most receive just a few hours of training.

The training itself can fall far short: some did not receive instruction about operating the voting system in the precinct they were working. Some did not have an opportunity to actually practice on the machine: election day was their first experience following training.

UPA's Voting and Usability Project members note that good instructional material doesn't replace good training. Too many pollworkers are put in situations where they aren't well prepared and where they don't have the information they need. Usability and technical support professionals both know how "creative" people can be in trying to solve problems. We can't change human nature, but we can understand the stresses and problems of running an election, and be prepared.

The constraints of running an election often mean that pollworkers will need to fall back upon their instruction manuals and other written materials. Election officials are encouraged to 1) review their instructional materials, 2) clarify them with the plainest language possible, and 3) test their instructions with poll workers using a process similar to the LEO usability testing process for ballots.

More information:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080223/
ap_on_el_ge/pollworker_problems

Human-Centered Voting Presented

2008-02-19T17:20:00.000-08:00

Auburn University Distinguished Professor Juan Gilbert and his research team from the Human Centered Computing Lab will join other scientists presenting innovative voting technologies at the Future of Voting Forum on Capitol Hill on March 6th from 9am – Noon. Professor Gilbert’s Interactive Voice Response voting system allows voters with varying abilities to vote equally, while simultaneously providing a voter-verifiable audit trail.

More: http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=124

GAO Says 13th Congressional Machines Test OK -- but They Fail to Usability Test

2008-02-19T17:09:00.000-08:00

The General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted functionality tests of Florida’s 13th Congressional District race, and determined that the machines appear to be functioning properly. The 13^th Congressional District came under scrutiny in 2006 when some 18,000 undervotes resulted in scrutiny from the US House of Representatives.

After determining the source code in escrow produced the same firmware, the GAO tested the function of a sampling of machines throughout the district. They concluded that “(1) the machines properly displayed, recorded, and counted the selections for all test ballots cast during ballot testing involving 112 common ways a voter may have interacted with the system, and (2) the deliberately miscalibrated machines, though difficult to use, accurately recorded the ballot selections as displayed on screen.”

The GAO notes, however, that “the large undervote in Florida's 13th Congressional District race could have been caused by factors such as voters who intentionally undervoted, or voters who did not properly cast their ballots on the iVotronic DRE, potentially because of issues relating to interaction between voters and the ballot." (Our emphasis)

We are Disappointed

UPA’s Voting and Usability project members are dismayed that the GAO missed their opportunity to promote usability testing as a means to answer those questions, as well as the likeliest method for preventing serious usability obstacles in ballot design.

Usability testing would have helped identify the likely interaction problems real voters would encounter, including the likelihood that voters might fail to vote in the US House race. Although the GAO has an expert review that suggests this problem could have been predicted, usability testing would confirm and quantify those indications.

What’s more, we wish the GAO would promote usability testing before elections to help prevent such problems. The federal Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines and certification can only cover the capabilities of a voting system. The ballots for each election are produced by the local election officials, and require separate, easy to implement testing, such as the testing method available through the LEO Usability Testing kit.

More about the GAO report: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08425t.pdf

More about LEO: http://www.upassoc.org/civiclife/voting/leo_testing.html;

More about the Voting and Usability Project: http://www.upassoc.org/civiclife/voting/index.html

More about the VVSG: http://www.eac.gov/voting%20systems/
voting-system-certification/2005-vvsg

More about Banner Blindness in Ballot Design - Jakob Nielsen, Feb. 2007
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness-ballot-design.html

California Ballots Still Being Counted

2008-02-19T16:59:00.000-08:00

A combination of flaws in the Feb. 5 California primary ballots has resulted in a vote count that continues, according to the New York Times. It reports that “election officials say a combination of high turnout, technology flaws and millions of mailed-in and dropped-off ballots have led to painstakingly slow returns in some counties, with nearly 800,000 ballots remaining to be processed.”

Among the problems noted by the Times:

In Los Angeles County, 205,000 ballots were waiting to be tallied. Some 49,000 of those are being examined because voters failed to mark a bubble indicating the party they wished to vote for, but properly marked a vote for a candidate. (Some consider that “extra bubble” to be a design flaw that was incorporated when the ballot was adapted from punch card, but unnecessary for this election.)
Absentee ballots in Contra Costa County are being ironed so that they can be fed into the vote-counting machines.
Damage from warehousing the ballots, weather and mishandling by voters means that some ballots have to be handled with special, time-consuming care.
High turnouts are overwhelming the already-stressed election officials, who must juggle three major elections this year.

More: (may require registration)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/us/politics/17vote.html
?_r=1&sq=california%20primary%20ballots&st=nyt&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&
scp=1&adxnnlx=1203429495-hjwTTFk69FtX/kieWsuWlg

Ballots Not Counted in LA Primary Because "Extra Box" Not Marked

2008-02-08T06:59:00.000-08:00

In addition to the normal confusion over voting in presidential primaries, the New York Times notes that some independent Los Angeles County voters did not have their vote counted because they failed to mark "an extra box" on their ballot.

http://tinyurl.com/2hp9tp
(Registration may be required.)

The article notes "One of the more significant problems occurred in Los Angeles County, where independent voters in at least 15 precincts said they were never told they had to mark an extra box on their ballots for them to be counted."

EXPAT PARTY PRIMARY ONLINE

2008-01-30T18:26:00.000-08:00

Expatriate Democratic party members will be able to cast votes in an online presidential primary targeted for people living outside the US, according to the Great Lakes IT Report for Jan. 22. The online tech newsletter reports that their global presidential preference primary will be conducted from Feb 5 - 12 by Internet polling as well as fax, email and in-person voting. While this primary is a party-run activity, the organizers hope to ease some of the difficulties associated with foreign mail exchange and overseas voting complications that are seen in US elections as well.

PROPOSED FED PLAIN LANGUAGE RULES COULD HELP ELECTIONS, TOO

2008-01-30T18:17:00.000-08:00

An important part of ballot usability relates to the use of language: on the ballot, in the polling materials and instructions for both voters and precinct workers. A bill before US Congress can have an impact: The Plain Language Bills, S2291 and HR 3548, require that US government communications - including "letter, publication, form, notice, or instruction" -- likely including balloting materials -- be presented in clear, easy-to-understand language.

The Usability Professionals' Association has submitted a letter endorsing this initiative. You can let your US Congress member and Senator know that you support the Plain Language bill as well. Visit http://www.senate.gov and http://www.congress.org.

The UPA Letter of Support: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/about_upa/
for_the_press/press_releases/press.080128.html

More information about Plain Language and government: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/civiclife/access/
plain_language.html
http://www.plainlanguage.gov

Pew wants to make voting work

2007-08-09T15:59:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to write about the grant proposal that I was involved in making to the Pew Charitable Trusts. I was hoping to be able to say that we got the grant and that we were looking forward to work on the project. But Pew got many more proposals than they had expected and it’s taking somewhat longer for them to review the proposals than they had planned.

Well, okay. I’ll tell you about the project we had in mind, after all.

First, I have to give the credit to Nick Handy for coming up with the idea and nudging me to do something with it. Nick is the Director of Elections for the state of Washington.

Pew wants to Make Voting Work

The Pew Charitable Trusts – yes, the same ones that sponsor many PBS television programs – does great stuff, including supporting research in areas related to political science, sociology, and technology and many other areas.

Last spring Pew put out a call for grant proposals for a project they called Make Voting Work. They invited project ideas that looked at “new diagnostics and new proposals” for making voting and election administration work better.

So do we, by incorporating usability testing in the process

My group thinks that incorporating usability testing into the local ballot creation process (along with best practices on ballot design and ballot language) will reduce over votes and undervotes, minimize voter and election official errors, reduce the need for recounts, and improve the voting experience.

Can a team of local elections officials and usability practitioners build an easy-to-use training and implementation kit that local elections officials can and will use to conduct their own usability tests?

We think so because we’ve already started to do this by training local elections officials in Washington State to usability test their own ballots (see my previous blog entry, Ballot Usability & Accessibility: Progressive Washington State: Training local elections officials to usability test ballots). But we don’t know how well that’s working until we follow those tested ballots through elections.

The idea is to embed processes in the election cycle that support voter intent, not just make ballots usable by election administrators. We think that usability testing is the single most important missing step in preventing disasters due to ballot design and ballot language.

We requested a planning grant that links local elections officials and professional usability practitioners to help local elections officials learn how to usability testing as a standard part of the ballot creation process.

We’re quite a consortium

Michigan State University’s Usability and Accessibility Center would be the administrator of the grant, with Sarah Swierenga (its Director) as the principal investigator. I’d be the lead researcher. Ginny Redish has offered to be a senior advisor. Whitney Quesenbery, Josie Scott, and Susan Becker will also be on the team as researchers.

Our proposal includes additional financial support from the Usability Professionals’ Association. We would get in-kind support from state elections departments in Washington, Oregon, Michigan, and Texas.

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

If Pew doesn’t fund it, know of anyone else who might be interested?

Back in Session

2007-07-30T14:46:00.001-07:00

While the Ballot Usability blog has been on vacation, a lot has happened:

I attended the Pacific Northwest Election Director’s Conference in Portland, OR. (June)
With a fabulous team, I submitted a proposal to the Pew Charitable Trusts for a project to train local elections officials how to usability test their ballots. (May)
I went to Stockholm on vacation, where I met people at the International Institute for Democracy and Election Assistance. (July)
The San Francisco Ballot Simplification Committee has started up again to write summaries of ballot measures for the November election. (July/August)

I’ll write about the second through fourth items later. Right now, I want to talk about the first.

Local elections workers are amazing

The program at the election directors’ conference in June was excellent. It covered topics ranging from security of voting machines to anticipated changes in the Help America Vote Act and the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. There were some important sessions on Lessons Learned from the Washington state gubernatorial election in 2004 (it was recounted several times after the initial tally showed a difference between the two candidates of one vote) and the 2006 mid-term election in Sarasota County, Florida (where the very close congressional race is still being litigated).

One highlight of the conference for me was a session presented by Marcia Lausen, who talked about the work that Design for Democracy had done for the Elections Assistance Commission on the design of ballots and voter information. (I was an advisor to the project, so I was pleased that the audience was very receptive to what Marcia had to say.)

Meeting some of the 350 local elections officials from a dozen different states was enlightening. There were of course many war stories. To run an election is to take care of thousands of intersecting and overlapping details all under the public eye. But my main realization from talking with these excellent public servants is that they really care about how to run elections. They want to do the best job possible. But elections continue to get more complex, not simpler, as more races are close and voting systems draw contentious attention from sometimes competing interests of security activists, accessibility activists, and others. So, anything that makes it simpler to do any small part of an election well is good.

This is why people were so interested in what Marcia had to say. They wanted solutions to ballot design problems that they already knew about and had all been experimenting on to solve in their individual counties. They wanted templates and clip art that was portable to the system they were using to layout and print ballots. They just wanted to be able to do the right thing the right way, and now they had some new tools for doing that in the guidelines developed by Design for Democracy and published by the Elections Assistance Commission.

I hadn’t wanted to go. I was traveled out and conferenced out. But going was one of the best things I’ve done this year.

Voting and cognitive disabilities

2007-06-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

Today the New York Times published an article by Pam Belluck, "States Face Decisions on Who Is Mentally Fit to Vote" citing actions taken by elections officials in Rhode Island to stop people who live in mental hospitals from voting.

The article refers to recommendations for national standards related to allowing people with cognitive disabilities to be made by the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging. These proposed standards were developed at a symposium I was at in March. The consensus of the symposium was that people be prevented from voting only if they cannot indicate, with or without help, “a specific desire to participate in the voting process.”

State officials are concerned with enforcement of old laws that bar people with mental disabilities from voting as "idiots" or "insane." Others are concerned that voters with cognitive disabilities are being coerced or worse, that someone else is voting for them in a way they would not have intended.

What does this have to do with ballot design?
The ABA recommendation makes the ballot (and the voting system overall) the test of whether someone can vote. That is, if a registered voter expresses the desire to vote and is able to mark and cast a ballot (with or without help), she can vote. If she spoils the ballot in the attempt to vote, there's no harm done to her or to the electoral system.

Using plain language in clear instructions along with best practices in visual and graphic design all voters benefit. People with cognitive disabilities (and let us not forget that some large number of Baby Boomers are going to end up with some level of dementia) will be able to cast a secure, private ballot that they feel confident about.

Guidance on language on ballots

2007-06-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

When I was in Olympia and Spokane talking with local election officials in May 2007, I heard a lot of concern about the wording of instructions and measures.

Instruction language is often controllable locally

While statutes or regulations may specify certain types of instructions that you must include on a ballot, often the wording is not constrained. Measures are a different story.

Guidelines exist!

There are some basic guidelines, for language on ballots, most recently a set by NIST ‘authored by Ginny Redish.

Using best practices drawn from several disciplines related to writing instructions, the Ginny reviewed 100+ paper ballots from all U.S. states and Washington, D.C. covering three different elections, along with sample ballots on three DREs. On the DREs Ginny also reviewed navigation instructions and information and error messages.

Nearly all the ballots reviewed violated some best practices. Just some of the 20 practices that ballots are not following include using familiar common words, using short sentences, putting instructions in logical order, telling people about consequences before they act, and explaining the context before telling people what to do.

Download the two NIST documents on ballot language. Use the guidelines on your ballots. And tell us how well your ballots do in usability tests.

Progressive Washington State: Training local elections officials to usability test ballots

2007-05-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

When I met Nick Handy, director of elections for Washington State, at a reception in March 2007, I almost made him spill is drink.

“So, Dana, what do you do?”

“I study how people interact with products,” I said.

Nick seemed curious. “Give me an example.”

“Well, a lot of what I do is testing web sites for how usable they are. I observe people who are like the target audience trying to use the sites to see where they get stuck. But I’m also doing similar research about ballot design.”

Nick smacked his forehead with his free hand, turned to his friend John Lindback (director of elections for Oregon), and said, “I can’t believe we’ve never thought of doing that before!”

Regional training for county elections officials

Nick was so excited that he returned to his hotel room to fire off an enthusiastic email to his staff about incorporating usability practices in the election cycle.

But first, could we include training about usability in the upcoming regional training?

Ballot design, usability, and accessibility: May 22 in Olympia and May 24 in Spokane

On each of two days in May 2007, about 70 county local elections officials gathered for regularly scheduled regional training. Libby Nieland (from the state department of elections) presented on ballot design first. The second half of the day was set aside for Patty Murphy and Kay Ramsey (also from the state DofE) to talk about accessibility in voting.

In between, in what I think is a first in the U.S. (maybe the world), I had the privilege of getting to spend two hours teaching a total of 140 local elections officials how to do usability testing. I focused on testing ballots, but the enthusiastic attendees quickly understood that they could use this tool for lots of other things, such as finding solutions to known issues they have with return envelopes or instructions on ballots.

It was a proud day for Washington State and me – and my fellow usability professionals. Get a copy of the training materials that I used. Send me feedback about them.

Developing the LEO (local elections officials) usability testing kit

2007-05-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

A little more than year ago, Whitney Quesenbery had a crazy idea: What if someone taught local elections officials to do their own usability testing of ballots?

The MSU-UPA working group

Whitney called together a few people who thought it was an interesting idea. In April 2006, the “LEO kit” was born. LEO stands for Local Elections Official.

We worked together over a couple of days at Michigan State University’s Usability and Accessibility Center to scope out a usability testing “kit” to be used by people who have no specific training on usability or human factors engineering.

Then we went off to work on things separately and remotely, trading drafts and review comments through a wiki.

Designing a test protocol for people who aren’t usability professionals

We had a lot of questions:

What do LEOs need to know to be able to conduct an effective usability test?
How can we help LEOs understand the immediate and rippling benefits of usability testing their ballots?
How can we give LEOs a great tool without adding significantly to their workloads?
When in the elections cycle should ballots be tested?
How many participants should LEOs include in each test?
What constraints do LEOs have?

The pieces of the kit

We eventually agreed on three pieces for the kit:

generic test plan that acts like a “how to” for planning usability tests of ballots
template session script, which provides direction for moderating individual usability testing sessions, complete with what to say, when
final report template to use to report results internally to elections departments or to the public.

We hope you’ll try them and send us feedback on how they worked for you. We will incorporate comments and post revisions regularly. If you want to be notified about updates to the LEO kit, let us know.

Wide margins are good

2006-11-10T09:32:00.000-08:00

The month before the mid-term election was busy for all of us who have an interest in how the election would go. Below Josie Scott, one of the directors of the Usability Professional's Association (UPA) Voting and Usability Project kindly provided observations about voting in mid-Michigan.

Among Josie's more memorable moments...

Without the tiny sticker, all is lost

Our voter registration list is produced by the state. When a voter produces an application to vote, precinct inspectors are now required to mark the list and issue a tiny sticker to the hapless voter, who then must produce it for the poll book inspector. The inspector will, in turn, affix the sticker to the poll book and issue the ballot. It took 40 minutes between application and ballot, so I managed to accidently affix the sticker to my application to vote.

In mom's precinct, the poll workers figured out a workaround, and painstakingly cut tiny pieces of waxed paper upon which they fixed the little sticker. I couldn't take a photo of that, but I admired the ingenuity. Nonetheless, one voter lost her little piece of wax paper while waiting, and it was never recovered.

Precinct traffic didn't flow efficiently

My precinct might have seemed convoluted to me until I observed the flow of my mother's precinct. They actually routed voters to the second station instead of the first station. Then they tried to manage the problem by sending new voters to the first station, but in the meantime, perhaps 20 voters waited sans stickers in the poll book line.

It took voters a long time to vote

We had some tough questions this year, and the process of marking the ballot took a while for some. One voter managed to mismark her ballot, which the scanner promptly rejected. "This was just practice" she remarked out loud as she obtained another ballot.

No one voted on the accessible stations, which would be unfortunate if the machine makes the mark and a single disabled voter uses the system. We should encourage clerks to use the system for any voter that wishes to vote (especially when lines are long), so that no voter is indentifiable by the type of mark on the ballot.

It took me 45 minutes to vote at 7:45 a.m. I was voter number 78.

My mother took 65 minutes to vote. She was voter number 1033.

All photos (c) Josephine Scott, 2006

Questions about ballot usability research

2006-10-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog know that I have been reviewing a lot of research about ballot usability. Although the results provide many needed answers, I just keep coming up with questions.

The first set is about understanding who voters are.

Who are voters, anyway?

Is there a documented mental model of voters' tasks that we all should be using to create a more accurate conceptual map for voting systems? For example, how common is it for voters to enter the booth knowing how they're going to vote? Are there voter personas written up anywhere?
Do we know how regular people normally talk about and perform the act of voting?
What is the conversation that the voter is having in the voting booth? What are we missing by looking mainly at time on task and error rates in mock voting situations?

Are we really understanding intent when we do research outside a real election?

And oh, I have many questions about "voter intent" in the research.

Most of the research I've read so far is either retrospective and indirect (looking at residual vote rates for past elections) or is based on mock election setups (with made-up parties, candidates, and measures outside a regular election). Just taking the mock election type of study, how can we be sure we're accurately measuring voter intent?
If you give the voter a slate to vote from, aren't you just testing whether they can follow the instructions for the study (rather than the usability of the system or ballot)?
If you give the voter a guide to choose from, how do you know they didn't change their mind when they got to look at the actual ballot?
If you give the voter a guide to choose from, then ask them at the end of the session who they voted for, how reliable is what they remember?

You can videotape the sessions at each and every station, and then check the video tapes, but do you really know for sure what the voter intended to do, even then?

Also, setting up a situation where study participants review a guide first isn't realistic. We don't know whether people typically do this, for one thing. But for another, in a real election, voters are inundated for weeks or months with campaign material that -- whether they are paying attention or not -- must influence how people vote.

Performance versus preference

There is often no relationship in usability studies done in the US (no matter what the topic) between observed performance and how study participants rate the thing they used and their experience with it.

When studies use over- and undervotes as errors, why do satisfaction ratings matter?
What are we really learning about confidence and satisfaction by using ratings? We don't know why people feel confident that their vote is being cast as they intended.

On what do study participants base their confidence ratings? (Are we culturally predisposed to trusting computers?)

I don't think we know very much about who voters are. I don't think we have a good way of measuring intent in usability studies. And if performance and preference don't match, I'm not confident that some elections official won't use that difference to discount findings or to pick the set of data that best supports his position.

Is lack of usability an inherent problem in residual vote rates?

2006-09-16T11:49:00.000-07:00

After reviewing a big pile of recent research about voting and usability (what I’ve been doing rather than posting to this blog the last couple of weeks), I was left with the question: Are residual votes inherently usability problems?

I realize that counting is a technical problem, and could result in residual votes – undervoting or overvoting.

But more questions come to mind:

Why do people overvote? (That is, make more selections for an office than are allowed.)

Why do people undervote? (That is, making fewer choices for an office than are allowed.)

Why do voters undervote?

We assume in both over- and undervoting that people are doing this unintentionally for the most part. Although I have read a report of a voter saying that he voted for two candidates for state representative because he had promised both he would, obviously, there are times when voters would want to undervote. I don’t want to worry about intentional undervoting – I wonder about unintentional undervoting.

There are many motivations for intentional undervoting: I don’t vote for judges because I know nothing about them. I only vote for the two candidates when I could have voted for more candidates because I want my vote to be weighted toward those two candidates. I’m just not interested in voting for anything except President. I don’t think my vote counts for anything in the presidential race.

Well, okay. But what about accidental undervoting? This must come down to problems with design of the polling place, voting systems, the ballot, and how pollworkers are trained and function. Bear with me while I explore in a sort of thought experiment the type of problems there might be with the information and visual design of ballots. Yes, this is conjecture. We need more research.

What are some usability problems in using ballots?

As the post below asserts, a number of researchers have identified a variety of usability problems. Most of the research I have reviewed about usability and voting is conducted from a social sciences or political sciences point of view. Based on research in areas such as cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, information design, linguistics, reading, and technical writing Ginny Redish identified likely problems with the design of ballots, focusing on instructions on ballots. Her review of ballots from all 50 states and D.C. shows that instructions

Are inconsistent
Don’t anticipate likely mistakes
Don’t cover important situations, such as straight-party voting and writing in candidates
Use computer jargon
Use voting jargon
Use other words that may confuse voters
Name buttons in ways that may not be explicit enough
Signal voters to vote before they’ve completed the ballot
Put the action before the context
Are all in one place, not where they’re needed
Are not in logical order
Come too early or late to be useful
Are in paragraphs, not separate lines
Are statements, not directions
Use gender-based pronouns
Threaten rather than help voters
Use double negatives rather than the positive

See http://vote.nist.gov/instructiongap.pdf to get a copy of Ginny’s report, entitled “Review of the gap between instruction for voting and best practice in providing instructions.”

Looking at design heuristics for forms and user interfaces, possibly these problems cause undervoting, too:

It may not be obvious what his touchable or markable on a ballot.
Colors, contrast, or other visual cues may be missing or too subtle for voters to know that their choice has been completed.
The touchable area may not be large enough to hit easily.
It may not be easy to get back to a screen on the Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machine that the voter has been to already; it may not be easy to distinguish which cards or pages or sides of cards are for which types of offices or decisions.
Messages may not be worded plainly or assume that voters knows more about the system than they do.
The divisions among offices may not be obvious enough, or they may be so close to the bottom edges of the screen that voters with vision problems may miss them.
The design of the page or the wording of the instructions may demand that voters make inferences about something, which they may not be able to do.

While researchers have collected data on the numbers of over- and undervotes, it is difficult to say even from observational studies what the specific problems are that cause residual votes.

Looking at these likely problems, what else might be causing over and undervotes, and are they different on optical scan ballots versus online on a DRE? Here are my preliminary thoughts about causes:

Optical

Over

Voter makes a mistake marking intended candidate
Doesn’t understand limitations on multi-candidate races

Under

Voter is unaware of multiple candidate option
Doesn’t understand multiple candidate option
Doesn’t find all candidates she wants to vote for, either because of rotation (not alphabetical) or some other reason
Doesn’t see the race at all (perhaps because of the position on the card)

DRE

Over

Probably not possible on a DRE – implications are that voter doesn’t vote for intended candidate though, because she can’t figure out how to change her vote

Under

Voter misunderstands instructions
Doesn’t see that it is a multi-candidate race
Can’t find the name she wants to vote for, either because of rotation or some other reason
Cannot physically select candidate (because of bugs or disability)
Doesn’t see the name because of glare
Missed a race divider so didn’t see that there was another race to vote in

Are voters’ tasks supported by information design and language in ballots and voting systems?

Since much of the research about usability and voting seems to say that error rates are similar across voting systems when the voting population is fairly homogeneous (minority, low income, and low education populations have higher residual vote rates than white, affluent, highly educated voters), let’s think again about the types of problems that all those voting systems might have. See the posting for Friday, August 25.

Many of the known and suspected problems I think come from information design. Why would these things happen? Redish’s review suggests that some problems are probably due to placement and order of information along with language. I suggest, based on other research that I’ve done, that other problems come from visual design interacting with information design, such as typography.

A voter may not be able to find what they are looking for because of

Rotation order of candidates.
Visually, two (or more) offices run together, or one office runs over two pages.
There are no obvious instructions (the instructions are in a separate place or not visible within the voter’s field of vision).
Items are too close to the bottom or top of the screen.

A voter may not be able to see things because

The type is too small.
There isn’t enough contrast between the type and the background.
The line height is too tight, so things are too close vertically.
Information is in all caps, which turns the words into a solid block visually that is ignored.
Shaded areas to divide offices on an optical scan ballot may turn them into blank spots that are ignored.

Then there are ergonomic issues that may commingle with the information design problems. The setup of the physical system might mean that

Lighting at the polling place creates glare on the DRE screen.
The angle of a screen leaves parts of the ballot not visible.
The height of the booth makes it difficult to reach the screen or uncomfortable to mark an optical scan ballot.

Then there is language. Language-action theory, says that “action is initiated and shaped by conversations.”^{^[1]} The language of ballots must make up at least part of the “conversation” that the voter is having while voting. Bill Killam says he’s seen interaction “between the ballot instructions and the voter’s perception of both computerized systems and elections as official activities. The effect was observed in how they interpreted the instructions (therefore how they acted) as well as how important it was to them (think performance anxiety).” This cognitive load suggests that Redish is right about emphasizing that instructions should be made up of “short, succinct, clear sentences” written in “gender-neutral, simple, and consistent language.” As I said, more research is needed.

[1] Denning & Dunham, Innovation as language action, Communications of the ACM, Volume 49, Number 5 (2006), pages 47-52

Corrections to citations

2006-08-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

In my last posting I had mistakenly cited Michael Alvarez's book, Information and Elections, when I should have cited his 2002 article, "Ballot Design Options."

Also, I cited Scott Roberston, but he was actually citing Bederson, et al. 2003, "Usability of large scale public systems: Electronic voting system usability issues."

Both of these mistakes are corrected in the post below.

Common Ballot Usability Problems

2006-08-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

While reading over the research I have gathered so far, I have come across a few sources from which I could extract some common usability problems with ballots. Here they are:

Bederson, et al. 2003, "Usability of large scale public systems: Electronic voting system usability issues."

Unable to mark properly
Unable to write in properly
Readability

Font size
Font design
Conspicuousness

Comprehensibility
Ability to associate a selection box, button, lever or punch hole with the right choice
(This apparently happens on optical scan ballots, as well. See Alvarez, et al. 2006. The Complexity of the California Recall Election in which the authors discuss "vertical proximity" where names "neighboring" the most prominent candidates received a disproportionately large number of votes, suggesting that even "randomized" name order is not neutral and the effect is probably due to alignment problems -- all of which relates to the next two items.)
Order effects
Position effects
Cues important for reminding or decision making (e.g., political affiliation)
Voting instruction
Error prevention and correction
Diversity, e.g., language, disability
Image and icon design
Residual voting (failure to mark votes for candidates or issues)

Roth, Susan King. 1998 (reprint 2000). Disenfranchised by design: Voting systems and the election process. Information Design Journal 9,1,1-8

Ease of use
Accessibility
Effective communication of information on the ballot
Ability of the system to reduce voter error
Potential to reduce voting fall-off (undervoting)
Time to vote
“…context of use – it presents information used in decision-making, under the pressure of time, in a controlled environment.”

Alvarez, 2002. Ballot Design Options.

Amount of information (number of contests/issues) on one card/screen
Navigating through the online ballot
Difficulty getting an overview of the ballot and the voter’s choices

In addition, local elections officials I have talked with cite these issues as they review ballots and collect feedback from poll workers after election day:

Undervoting
Overvoting
Not voting both sides of an optical scan ballot
Font is too small (they provide magnifying glasses in the polling places)
Not knowing how to mark the ballot (voters fail to connect arrows, or circle names or mark with Xs rather than connecting the arrow or filling in the oval)
Erasing on a paper or optical scan ballot
Have difficulty finding candidates in rotation order
Writing in unqualified candidates
Marking a candidate and writing them in
Ranked choice (instant run-off) voting is problematic

The lists are similar, but what conclusions can we draw? And how can we solve these problems? I hope that upcoming research by Design for Democracy and other work sponsored by NIST will reveal solid answers.

What the process is really like

2006-08-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Barbara, my contact in the San Francisco Department of Elections, responded quickly to the flow diagram I sent to her for comment. She said it was "pretty accurate" and "close to what happens" but that "the beginning stages are not nearly as smooth as in the diagram. For example, right now there's a two-way flow of information between me and ES&S: I am sending them bits of updated information as I get it, and they are sending me ballot drafts with holes for the information that I still need (e.g., translations)."

I suspected this might be the case. I haven't figured out a reasonable way to represent that iterative, flexible exchange very well. I'm open to suggestions at dana@usabilityworks.net.

What local elections officials control on ballots

2006-08-15T11:01:00.000-07:00

On August 7, 2006, I met with two people from the San Francisco Department of Elections to learn about the ballot design process. Barbara Carr, who is a clerk in the department, sees the ballot and the Voter Information Pamphlet (VIP) through the entire process from gathering information for the pieces at filing time all the way through printing and distribution. Linda Tulett is the deputy director of elections.

San Francisco uses arrow-connecting optical scan ballots in ES&S Eagle machines for regular and absentee ballots. The City uses oval fill-in optical scan ballots with an AUTOmark machine for HAVA compliance.

I had worked with Barbara in my role as a member of San Francisco's Ballot Simplification Committee.

Constraints from the state
Before our meeting, Barbara had pointed me to the sections of California state elections code that guide (and often constrain) the design and instructions on the ballot. (See Division 13 in the code.) In my light review of the code, I could see that there were some strange and interesting design constraints dictated. For example,

...immediately to the right of and on the same line as the
name of the candidate, or immediately below the name, if there is not
sufficient space to the right of the name, there shall be printed in
eight-point roman lowercase type the name of the qualified political
party with which the candidate is affiliated.

Emphasis mine.

The code goes on to allow three words to describe a candidate's "designation" such as a current office held or other role. There are several paragraphs on what constitutes a "word" in this case. For example, if the candidate wants to include a place name that is made up of two words (such as San Francisco), that counts only as one word.

These are just two examples of the type of specificity of the elections code. I was surprised that the state elections code dictates items to this level of detail, but have learned that this is true in most other states.

Constraints from the City
From the City are ordinances that cover what languages must be on the ballot, in what order. In San Francisco, there are three languages on most ballots: English, Spanish, and Chinese. All primary ballots must have at least two languages, so they are set up to be English/Spanish and English/Chinese.

When Barbara, Linda and I talked about type size, layout and order, Barbara and Linda talked about some of the trade-offs between ease-of-reading and budget concerns. If you have larger type, the ballot may flow over to more cards. The more ballot cards you have, the more it costs to print, to mail to absentee voters, and to create provisional ballots that may not be used.

There are many other local ordinances that constrain control of design of ballots, as well.

Constraints from the voting machine manufacturer
To ensure that the ballot cards are properly scanned, there must be tracking blocks at the edges to tell the scanner which end is up and what ballot card is going through. This takes up space, but generally wasn't a concern.

I was interested to find out that the City doesn't have the ballot layout software and that someone from the voting machine manufacturer lays out the ballot. Usually that person is doing that work outside the Department offices, but sometimes -- usually depending on how close to deadline time it is -- the vendor is on site at City Hall.

I suppose that the logic is that having the expert -- someone from the manufacturer -- doing the layout ensures that the process is quicker and less likely to introduce errors than if someone in the Department did the work. Learning this left me wondering though if there were things that could be done with the ballot layout software that the people in the Department didn't know about:

Could the instructions be positioned differently?
Could the contests be grouped differently visually?
Could there be more images that might help reading-disabled voters?

Etc.

What the process looks like
Out of that interview, along with some helpful materials that Barbara gave me, I drafted a process flow diagram for the ballot design process. Try double-clicking the image below to see a larger version; if you want a better copy, email me. I have sent it back to Barbara for her to review. It includes the timing in the election cycle for the major steps.

It was interesting to me that "usable" to Barbara and Linda, the local elections officials, meant that the ballot met all of the legal requirements and had nothing to do with how well it might support carrying out the voter's intent.

The good news: The wording of the instructions isn't constrained
As far as Barbara and Linda could find in the code and ordinances that they have to check the ballots and VIP against, the wording of instructions can say anything they feel is appropriate. That is, that wording isn't dictated by any rules they have to follow. They were interested in doing what they could to improve instructions on ballots and liked the idea that there might someday be research to support the decisions they make about how instructions are worded.

Rumaging through others' research

2006-08-15T10:30:00.000-07:00

For the last several days, I've been looking for primary research about ballot design. Of course, since it is handy, I've been looking on the Web for this information. A few interesting things have turned up. One irrefutable conclusion: There is no research on ballot instructions.

There have been several studies on the usability and accuracy of electronic voting systems (Bederson, et al.; Herrnson, et al.; Killam). Some cover accessibility of electronic voting systems (Burton & Uslan). One group has looked at the usability of paper ballots (Everett, Byrne and Greene). Usefully, one team has looked at issues for reading-disabled voters (Goler & Selker). The sources of many of these reports are listed in the links on the right side of this page.

Only Ginny Redish has started to look at instructions on ballots in work she did for NIST at the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006. See her reports, available here:
http://vote.nist.gov/instructiongap.pdf
http://vote.nist.gov/032906PlainLanguageRpt.pdf

When I can, I'll post a minimal annotated bibliography with links to the reports I have.

I've also found book titles on topics that may be related to ballot design, but the printings seem to be limited; I haven't been able to find copies locally to me:

Neimi, R. G. and Herrnson, P.S. Ballot design: How to improve life at the ballot box.
Election Center, National Task Force on Accessible Elections; National Organization on Disability. Voting, a constitutional right for all citizens: a guidebook to assist election officials to achieve equal access for all citizens to the polling place and the ballot.

There's also a poster:
University of Minnesota Design Institute. Voting by design: A communications map of the voter

If anyone out there has access to these documents and can send them to me for review, please email me at dana@usabilityworks.net.

Why this blog

2006-08-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

As far as I know, there is no blog about the usability and accessibility of ballots. There are a few people working on this area -- aside from doing research about voting machines -- and I invite those people doing research to talk to one another about it.