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

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/ 

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

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

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?

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.

NY Mayor proposes improvements to voter access, including ballot design

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

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.

Dear New York, please let me correct my ballot

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.

Ballot Design Still Matters

By Lawrence Norden – 11/10/09

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

About ballots:

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

About running a paper testing project across four countries:

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

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

 

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.

Top 10 guidelines for creating a plain language ballot

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



What to say and where to say it

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

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

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


How to say it

4. Write short sentences.

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

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

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

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


What to make it look like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing ballots, getting ready for November

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

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

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.

Better Ballots lists simple guidelines for making ballots easy to use

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

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

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

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