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A moment for politics and graphic ballot design

November 4, 2008 It’s finally Tuesday, November 4, 2008. This is my 125th blog. I have learned a lot, thought a lot, and I have learned to think in small editorial bits rather than epic-length works. It’s surprisingly difficult to write short blog-length editorials, and I hope that you in the blogsphere (blogdom?) are willing to put up with me longer.


Today is the day that our country votes. Interestingly, and surprisingly in one state 41 percent of eligible voters have already voted. That’s almost twice as many as voted in the 2004 election. That, in itself, is an amazing statistic about the election we’re having today.


Young people, with whom I consort daily, are the group who matter most in this election. I worked most of the summer to try to get young people 18-28 to vote in this election. I designed posters and pins and stickers and did everything in my graphical power to appeal to the young voter to get their interest in this election. But, according to Gallup, yesterday, my efforts may not have been very effective. They say that their polls do not show a significant youthful vote change in this election compared to the 2004 election. Drat!

Young people love graphics and videos and posters and pins. But, will they turn out today and vote? Most of my students told me yesterday that they had voted already, and that made me feel better (California offers “permanent mail-in ballot” status to college students who vote in their home precincts, but live away at school). I hope they are as interested in the future of their nation as they are in Undercolor Removal and Gray Component Replacement. I hope more.


There are some flaws in the system, even when it comes to the printed ballot. In some states – and this is hard to believe after the debacle of 2000 – the ballots are still not graphically understandable. Do you mark the bubble to the left of the candidate’s name, or the right? In some states the electronic voting machines have failed when tested by college students. Florida’s machines (imagine… Florida!) failed when a group of student-programmers tried touching the touch-screen, then dragging their finger downward. The votes were then cast for the next name on the ballot, or lost altogether. To me this is amazing.

The manufacturer said they never tried that (the touching-and-dragging part). And they were shocked to learn that the votes were not tallied correctly. Shocked!

We put our fingers on computers and related devices every day and we hardly give it a thought. Most of the time things work pretty well, but sometimes the interface is non-sensical. For example, yesterday, while running a popular color management application, I reached the end of the data-reading cycle and the program told me to save my data by clicking on the “Close” button. Why close? Why not “Save Data” or “Continue” or “Don’t fail me now!” It was counterintuitive, but it worked. In graphic arts we tolerate a bit of the counterintuitive.

In elections the stakes are higher. Can we, as a society, solve the technological problems of voting? Do we have the combined, collective skill to design a ballot (and perhaps a voting machine) that anyone can figure out? Can we do this in a way that is fair to all, yet easy to tally, and one which will provide some sort of an audit trail for recounting after a dispute?

Can we in graphic arts design a ballot, and a system for voting, which is so clear and intuitive that anyyone can use it without causing it to fail? I’d like to think, as I swipe my fingers across the glass track pad of my new MacBook Pro (more on that later) that it shouldn’t be so hard to do that.

Might it be possible to allow people to vote from their computers, and over the Internet? Could soldiers in a far-away land vote online, and could the system work while preventing voter fraud or error? Is the infrastructure in place to make this possible? I remain skeptical about the last of these question-topics.

But I am resolute in my desire to see voting work as well as some computer games I have seen. If a not-yet-literate child can successfully play a hand-held computer game (I witnessed this while flying to Phoenix last week) I am certain that we can design a system that accepts the votes of all people and tallies them accurately and effectively in the hands of a voting-age adult.

I vote for clarity in voting.

Posted by Brian Lawler on November 4, 2008 | Comments (0)