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/ 

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.

Guidelines for a Plain Language Ballot

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

1. Be specific. Give people the information they need.
   
   
2. At the beginning of the ballot, explain how to vote, how to change a vote, and that voters may write in a candidate.
   
   
3. Put instructions where voters need them.  For example, save the instructions on how to use the write-in page for the write-in page.
   
   
4. Include information that will prevent voters from making errors, such as a caution to not write in someone who is already on the ballot.
   
   
5. 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).
   
   
6. Make the page title the title of the office (State Supreme Court Chief Justice rather than Retention Question).
   
   
7. Have voters confirm that they are ready to cast their vote with a Cast Vote button, not a Confirm button.
   
   
8.  At the end, tell people that their vote has been recorded.

How to say it

9. Write short sentences.
   
10. 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."
    
11. 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."
    
12. Address the reader directly with "you" or the imperative ("Do x.").
    
13. Write in the active voice, where the person doing the action comes before the verb.
    
14. Write in the positive. Tell people what to do rather than what not to do.
    
15. Put context before action, "if" before "then." For example, To vote for the candidate of your choice, touch that person’s name.
    
16. When you want people to act, focus on verbs rather than nouns. For example, Write in a candidate's name.
    
17. When giving people instructions that are more than one step, give each step as an item in a numbered list.
    
18. Do not number other instructions. When the instructions are not sequential steps, use separate paragraphs with bold beginnings instead of numbering.
    
19. 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

20. Break information into short sections that each cover only one point.
    
21. Keep paragraphs short. A one-sentence paragraph is fine.
    
22. Separate paragraphs by a space so each paragraph stands out on the page.
    
23. Do not use italics.
    
24. Use bold for page titles.
    
25. Use bold to highlight keywords or sections of the instructions, but don’t overdo it.
    
26. Keep all the instructions in the left column. Do not put instructions under the choices for a contest.
    
27. 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.
    
28. 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! 

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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