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This is why designers should have more prominent roles in society. It’s easy to put designers into a stereotype and assume that most of them dropped out of college to sit in coffee shops and paint with their own blood, but what designers really do is solve problems. And this is a big one that NEEDS to be solved if this country wants to start heading in the right direction again.

End rant.

In Canada, at least in Quebec, you can’t miss! The page is black and the writing is in white. You cannot have your bulletin put aside because you stroke outside the circle…

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/180/435625428_78c7c364cc.jpg

Those bulletin are manually counted and we still usually get the result within the election night with recounts the very next day.

Everyone knows you can’t use a sans serif font for voting! Voting is Serious Business!

Nice find.

Maybe someone can explain something I’ve never understood.

In the first picture, you see text like “VOTE FOR NO MORE THAN ONE (1)”.

What is the purpose of writing the digit 1 after the word??

You can’t get any clearer that “ONE”. I can’t accidentaly type “TWO” when I mean “ONE”, the same way I can accidentally hit the ‘2’ key when I was aiming for the ‘1’ key.

So why write “1” after the “ONE” ??

This drives me crazy, especially as people try to use it to be official-sounding in silly situations, like “Please take only ONE (1) Lollipop” in my kid’s doctor’s office.

In the Netherlands they’ve got unusable voting computers. The advantage is that the votes are counted almost immediately. The disadvantage is that most old people do not know how to operate them. So the computer interfaces could therefore use a big redesign.

“Based on a fourth-grade reading level”. God bless America!

You’re assuming this is a problem the US government is interested in solving.

@Julien pretty much the same in Ontario. Goof proof really. Stuns me why the Yanks need all these machines for voting. Keeps an industry (and a lobby) alive I guess.

I like it that the most advanced tech I need to vote is a stubby little pencil!

Since you asked about ballots in other parts of the world, here’s how ballots in Brazil used to look like in 1998.

Pretty simple compared to yours. No written instructions either. Voters are educated on how to use the ballot beforehand, through television. At the ballot site there’s also a clerk that can instruct you (using model ballots without real candidates).

This was the last time a paper ballot was used in a major election (elections held simultaneously for president, state majors and senators, every 4 years).

Now they look like this.

Get the colors out of that ballot and I’d consider it – No need to pay tons of extra money for ballots that have color.

I did like the ballot redesign that we used in the Chicago primary election. We used to have the damn punch-card with the butterfly fold mess. Horrible shit. This time it was an enormous sheet of paper with really clear instructions to color in the circles for your choices. I wish I had taken a picture of that.

@Geoff

Couldn’t agree more. Here in the UK our ballots are really simple, and hand counted. We still get the results by the next day. In fact the UK system is probably one of the most brutal election systems in the world, vote on thursday, results friday, incumbant moves out of No 10 over the weekend as the new guy moves in, and is running the country on the Monday.

And we do all this using paper ballots hand-counted by volunteers (often bank-clerks).

If we have multiple ballots (local and national), get this, we use multiple bits of paper. Radical idea! Why this inisistance on squeezing every vote onto one piece of paper?

Unfortunatly the current government is easily distracted by “machines that go ping” and keeps experimenting with alternative forms of voting. Sigh.

Paul

Thanks for this post. Having recently entered the bureaucratic system through my daughter’s public school, I am 100% certain that the original ballot was designed not with an eye to providing a great, easy-to-use experience, but with the goal of meeting minimum legal requirements in the most lawsuit-proof manner possible.

@Brian: What’s wrong with a fourth-grade reading level? First, there is no education requirement for voting rights (and when there was, it was used to discriminate against African Americans). Second, this a ballot, not Tolstoy or a physics dissertation. As Strunk and White advise, omit unnecessary words.

@mike

“meeting minimum legal requirements in the most lawsuit-proof manner possible”

Wow. You have successfully summed up EVERY project performed by the gov’t or one of its contractors. I’ve never heard it so succinctly and accurately put.

@Neil, It wouldn’t necessarily be a ton of extra money to print in two colors instead of one. The biggest expense in printing is usually the cost of the paper. Also, I’m sure this could easily be produced on a Xerox DocuTech or some other toner-based digital press.

Gotta love that Quebec ballot. It can’t get more straight-forward than that!

It seems like the Canadian ballots must be same across the country, as my Nova Scotia ballots look the same.

It might also help that our electoral system is much, much simpler than that of the USA . We vote locally for a single person, and it sort of pyramids upwards from there to who becomes leader. For instance, I didn’t ever vote for a specific person to be our prime minister, but I did vote for the party that person was the leader of by casting my local vote for my local candidate.

USian politics confuse me!

I’ve always felt the hole punch next to the name is the biggest flaw. If you were able to highlight or select the actual name, there would be no more confusion.

@Geoff: Well in Massachusetts, a commonwealth (i.e. state) of the US, our november ballot will have elections for the following offices:

o US President/Vice President o US Senator o US Representative o State Senator o State Representative o Governor’s Councillor o County Registrar of Deeds o Count Registrar of Probate

Some county’s have additional county offices to elect.

2010 will have even more since while we don’t elect the US President/VP then, we elect the Governor/Lt. Governor, and four other commonwealth-wide officers. That’s a lot of ballots.

We don’t have a nice parliamentary system like you all in the UK or Canada (though smaller parties are much better represented in Ireland, Sweden or Germany). Instead, we elect most of the same people from two parties (well in MA, pretty much from only one party) with a much lower turnout. The appearance of choice without the substance. It’s … efficient. Yeah … that must be it.

Those are the German ballots. Note that we have two votes, one for the representative of an electoral district on the left („Erststimme“) and one for the party you prefer on the right („Zweitstimme“).

It says “You’ve got two votes” at the top followed by those arrows which then split to “one here” and “one here”.

So timely, I’ve been stuck on the US voting process for days now. Don’t know why, it just popped into my head and I can’t think about anything else. Spent all night last night wikipedia’ing electoral fraud.

As an extension of this convo, I’d love the 37signals guys to take a crack at ONLINE voting for US elections.

You can’t tell me that the country that sent 12 men to the moon can’t figure out a secure way to let people vote from their homes or offices.

Here’s how we do it in France:

First, only one election at a time. Instead of voting for president AND representative AND commissioner on the same day, we would have three elections at three different dates.

Then, it is forbidden to write on the slips or makes any sort of distinguishing mark (it’s an anonymous vote). Each option is represented by a discrete piece of paper, the voter puts one and only one piece of paper in the envelope.

THAT is the simplest possible way to do it, and it moots the point of designing ballots entirely.

NOT SHIT . Can we complicate this thing any more. The Canadian one is spot on.

There must be a way to get great design for ballots rather then some political nightmare that confuses the end user! US!

The parties probably dictate the aesthetics too much.

Keep it Simple.

I’ve always found the New Zealand ballot paper to be easy to read/use…

http://www.elections.org.nz/voting/votingsub/sample-ballot-paper.html

We have an MMP system, so you get one vote for a party, and one vote for a local representative.

Designers do have a very prominent role in society. So do carpenters. They build 90% of the visible structure of 95% of all homes in America. Nobody cares though, and carpenters don’t get paid very much. The design community is under appreciated and under paid because they choose to be. If designers learn set their own prices, and pick up some consultative selling skills, they can increase their salary by 100%. That’s why the highest paid firms still rake in big bills every day, even though there is a slew of cheap designers online available around the clock that are very creative.

What about a better ballot submission process?

In Oregon, we vote by maill. People have a few weeks to review the issues, candidates, etc… and fill out the ballot forms in their free time and drop them in the mail box.

That Quebec ballot is good, but all that black background is a waste of ink cartridges and not very earth-friendly. Black on white would be just as effective.

I think the major problem is the use of ballots to begin with. Come on guys, we haven’t seen a ballot in Brazil for at least a decade. Elections are fully automated around here and results are published just a few hours after the election. This isn’t a novelty. It’s actually old now.

What is preventing the US and other nations to use this kind of technology?

The design community is under appreciated and under paid because they choose to be.

I’d suggest the ballot-machine makers are overpaid. Pencil and paper work great in Canada. What’s the big advantage of machines if the security is just as suspect, AND you change the state from a relatively binary one for each eligible candidate (yes/no) to a much fuzzier one (covering everything from indent to hanging)

Maybe the design community should get some better lobby groups.

London Mayoral Elections. Simple and elegant.

Have to say US ballots really suck In sweden we have three elections at the same time and no registration is necessary. Just a checklist so you don’t vote twice. Each election have different color and markings there is also blank if you want to vote for a party that doesnt have ballots where you vote. Some have names if you want to vote for a a specific person. Most people just use one without names.

Parliament, A yellow ballot for each party.

Municipal council, Should have 3 black lines on the edge.

And regional council

“It’s tough to have much faith in your government’s ability to solve truly complicated challenges when it seems so inept at dealing with relatively simple issues.”

Exactly.

Though I note that in this case, a very high majority of the voting public seems to be able to fill one of these ugly things out correctly. What should we expect of voters? Perhaps the fact that someone can’t follow basic instructions and figure out how to vote is a reasonably good filtering of those who have no business voting.

reasonably good filtering of those who have no business voting.

Dangerous.

And yet, do you really think everyone voting has a clue about what they are doing? Of course they don’t.

Me again. Just read the US ballot. Secrecy sleeve? Seriously? We just call it an envelope. I think we know the reason why americans don’t vote. They simply give up trying to figure out how too =).

Touché Branding Mike. Touché.

I´m totally with Vinícius. Using paper in 2008 is unacceptable. It makes me wonder about the real reasons for this…

Paper ballots may be slow to process but they are also slow to hack.

What’s preventing fully electronic voting is the fact that such machines aren’t tamper-proof, and the hand that Diebold had in the way the votes went in 2000 in Florida. There have been experiments here in the UK but thankfully they don’t appear to be catching on. There’s no better method than a polling booth and a police guard for fraud prevention.

The Scottish elections of 2007 used a format much like this (names in this example are completely fictional!). Pretty straightforward, especially as proportional representation systems can be notoriously complex, right? You’d think. Unfortunately, at the same time as the elections for the Scottish parliament, there were ballots for the local councils, which you had to make at the same time. The council ballots used a totally different system of proportional voting (you had to vote 1,2,3 in order of preference), and the instructions were far from clear. Result? 180,000 votes out of a total eligible electorate of about four million were discarded because they were filled out wrongly. The Scottish National Party scraped into power by one seat, which they almost certainly wouldn’t have got if the ballot papers had been clearer. It was considered the fault of the Labour party, though, that the problems with the papers hadn’t been properly dealt with beforehand, so when they lost power everyone considered they’d got their just reward for their incompetence!

@Douglas Greenshields,

The Diebold thing was in Ohio in 2004, not Florida in 2000, I believe.

“The design community is under appreciated and under paid because they choose to be.”

How is that?

“If designers learn set their own prices, and pick up some consultative selling skills, they can increase their salary by 100%.”

You’re apparently arguing that raising prices and improving selling skills will increase demand. Perhaps a tiny, tiny bit.

I suspect that design (good design) – by most people – is viewed more as a luxury than a necessity. Sometimes this is true, sometimes this is not. And I think the times are slowly changing towards the ‘necessity’ view. But it’s still a cost and very few can afford to have everything they want in a project. Sometimes the ‘needs’ are all that can be afforded.

Another reason why designer skills are relatively lower is because the supply of designers exceeds the demand. Same issue with carpenters. Barriers to entry are lower. Designers should form a cartel and limit entry. Lots of other professions do this to varying degrees of success. (I actually don’t support this idea but it does work for doctors and others).

Democracy? Really? Where?

America is a Republic.

I agree that terrible design promotes terrible results. However, general and widespread ignorance of the law will hurt us regardless of the competence of our ballot designers.

Poor ballot design is as American as Apple Pie. It keeps the people who aren’t paying attention from impacting the outcome of the election. (Their votes are essentially random, and will cancel each other out.)

(I’m only half joking here…)

Oh, yes, I’ve heard that argument against automation before. There was a time when people believed that credit card transactions on the internet wouldn’t be possible, since they were considered to be insecure. Yet overtime this fear has vanished and now everybody uses credit cards on the net.

Discussions over the so-called insecurity of electronic elections were common place in Brazil many years ago. But you know what? Over time the system proved to work well. Several elections have used it and fraud has hardly been an issue so far.

So, here is what I think. The problem has nothing to do with “insecurity” of electronic elections. It has to do with a need for a cultural shift. The same kind that happened with electronic payment. And there’s more to it. Maybe the US government could be a little bit humble and accept the fact that other countries already solved this problem, and pretty well. Why not learn with them? Is it really necessary to re-invent the wheel? Is there a rule that says that only the US can create sound technologies?

Open your minds! Ballots are a thing from the past.

@Phil McThomas- the one (1) thing is handy in legal documents. If the doc gets faxed or copied, 3’s can look like 8’s and the like. So writing it out in words helps fix that. But if you can see it, the actual number is easier to read- it’s just a convenience, like on checks.

“There was a time when people believed that credit card transactions on the internet wouldn’t be possible, since they were considered to be insecure. Yet overtime this fear has vanished and now everybody uses credit cards on the net.”

Voting is different. I can get a receipt for my vote, but unlike my credit card I can’t verify that my vote was tallied correctly and prove to anyone that it wasn’t or have it changed. Once I vote, it’s pretty much a black hole and we have to rely on the integrity of everyone in the system who touches it. I think history has proven convincingly that voting systems are breakable.

It’s tough to have much faith in your government’s ability to solve truly complicated challenges when it seems so inept at dealing with relatively simple issues.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned that this is essentially the basis for conservative thought. Granted, I’m well on the liberal side - helping out the little guy and all - but even I think it’s important to consider that government can’t solve some problems.

@David:

I think you’re right: voting systems are breakable. And I would argue that this is specially true for non-electronic ones. As a matter of fact, history is full of cases of fraud in non-electronic elections.

You guys seem to be giving up on the idea that an electronic election can work before even giving it a good try. That’s weird. It’s not the attitude that I would expect from Americans. And in the process, as you argue that this is unfeasible, you also refuse to look at the history of other countries that have actually managed to make it work. Maybe instead of refusing to give it a try, it would be better to just go there and check out for yourselves.

@Vinícius Manhães Teles,

We actually do use electronic voting in many places throughout the US. Works like a charm. This has gotten MUCH better since the 2000 election was decided by a bunch of morons in Florida. But we have a state by state system, so it depends on where you live.

Apparently, some states are slow studies.

@Vinícius Manhães Teles

The problem boils down to not whether such a system is possible. It is possible to vote electronically.

There are other design considerations at play though. First, there’s the security. The major vendors in the U.S. are all closed source vendors. No one can verify they’re doing what they’re saying they’re doing. You’re taking the vendor at their word. Secondly, Diebold was a large contributor to Republican party campaigns. Now, I’m won’t say they don’t have the right to make those contributions. However, it gives the appearance of impropriety.

There have also been significant issues aside from that:

- The vendor changing the software and not getting it re-certified by state or local election officials

- E-voting machines have a very poor security model. Their internal accounting is lacking. It is possible to alter starting counts, subtract votes, not record votes, etc.

- E-voting machines, at least initially, lacked a paper printout that the voter could verify and that could be used in both a recount and a canvas sampling to ensure accuracy. When states began requesting said audit mechanisms, vendors pushed back, and charged incredible fees.

- E-voting machines can be mis-programmed. In one North Carolina county, several thousand votes were lost in 2004 when the number of voters exceeded the electronic system’s capacity. Those votes were unrecoverable and a new election had to be held.

When you have a system that requires trust, verification and transparency, any one of these would be fatal flaws. The exercise of democracy depends on this verification.

Even if you set aside all of the security and accuracy concerns, you’re left with the complexity. Touch screen voting is not the simplest solution to the problem of ballot design. Ballot design and physical machine capacity were the entire issues of the 2000 presidential election. Touch screens are far more expensive for little tangible benefit.

In Peru the ballot look like this: ballot.jpg

A person can vote even if he/she can’t read by identifying the logo of the party or the photo of the candidate.

Pretty sure those “Quebec” ballots are the same ones we use here in BC.

To the “Black on white would be just as effective” comment: No, it wouldn’t. Not unless you gave people a white out pen. The areas you fill in are the only large white areas on the form.

Honestly though, what ISN ’T the government horrible at. This is par for the course in everything they touch, from IRS forms, to social security, to NASA , to 5 construction workers all standing around a hole watching one guy dig.

In addition to Eric’s German ballot: There’s no need to “fill the oval” in Germany. Just put a cross into the bubble as indicated at the top.

And: You can use any pen you’d like instead of being forced to using a #2 pencil! :-D

In Germany ballots look like this. The copy is from the 2005 Bundestag elections. We can’t vote directly for the chancellor (you can’t see Angela Merkel there). This is done indirectly via the party.

I don’t read blogs, but reputation of 37signals swayed me to read this one;this entry today illustrates what is wrong with alot of the things government does. It is nice to see that my homeland can do something worth noting though, I always found the Canadian ballots to be “weird” but now I see the purpose.

.au a couple of fairly typical examples: http://www.elections.nsw.gov.au/local_government_elections/voting/how_to_cast_a_vote

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/pdfs/ballotpapersample.pdf

Yep, a paper system seems to work just fine here, too. Most seats are determined the night of the election with the occassional hanger on caused by postal votes (people go on holidays at the worst time! ;))

Sorry to self-link, but this ballot paper from Russia’s parliamentary elections last year is a nice example of influencing user-choice by design. The how-to-vote example features the incumbent party (instead of some made-up party), who luckily were also landed with the job of designing the ballots:

http://www.apricotflan.com/?p=149

Couple of Schneier articles on why paper voting makes perfect sense:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_problem_wit.html

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/voting_technolo.html

We don’t need electronic voting, but many influential people want electronic voting.

Electronic voting falls in the “just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should” category.

The tech-centric of this world need to learn to curb their enthusiasm for all things digital and think through the implications of their tech-nirvana. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

In Aus we have very simple ballots that get hand counted. I have no idea why a lever or a punch card system is in place – that seems like overkill. The way to vote correctly using the ballots is advertised on TV up until the day of the election. We have 2 ballots in a general election – one for the house of reps and one for the senate.

In the house of reps you get at green ballot paper and you have to number your the candidates for your area in order of preferences (1 – 5 usually). The political parties have people handing how to vote slips out at the polling centers so you can just grab one from the party yu are intending to vote for an follow the way they filled out the ballot in the sample they show you – see no thinky, thinky there.

In the senate you get a really big piece of white paper with all the candidates on it an the mantra is ‘1 box above the line or all the boxes below’.

1. Above the line – Voters may vote for a political party or group by putting the number ‘1’ in one box only above the black line. The rest of the ballot paper is left blank.

By casting a vote this way, voters are following the group voting ticket that the party or group has lodged with the Australian Electoral Commision. All the preferences will be distributed according to the group voting ticket.

2. Below the line – In the section below the line electors can vote by putting the number ‘1’ in the box of the candidate they want as their first choice, number ‘2’ in the box of the candidate they want as their second choice, and so on until all the boxes have been numbered. The top part of the ballot paper is left blank. You must put a number in every box below the black line. You decide your own order of choice for all the candidates.

Also no thinky, thinky and it has a little mantra to help you remember. The how to vote cards from the parties also cover senate voting.

Ballots are counted same day and everyone in Aus is legally obliged to vote in every election at every level (local/state/federal).

I dont know why the US has an -opt-in voting policy – aren’t they supposed to be the defenders of democracy. There must be too much invested on only ensuring a certain percentage of the population vote – because lets face it it’s pretty easy to manage paper balloting.

I’ve lived in USA and Australia.

USA has by far the worst designed forms.

Seven (7) different fonts, ALL CAPS , Mixed Caps, (UA&J)unnecessary acronyms and jargon.

In Australia, they still have a way to go, but at least they use color on their official paperwork, like ballots and tax packs.

So why write “1” after the “ONE” ??

I think this is a sometimes useful way to aid scanning, which we all do. Please take one (1) lolly pretty quickly makes “1” stick in your head and you get the picture without having to really read the sign at all.

Of course, then there are the geniuses out there that don’t get this and use the system something like “Please check more than one (1) box” which is 110% FAIL . It’s pretty clear the IRS employees more than a few of said geniuses.

Look at the U.S. National Weather Service. WE TYPE IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT ’S THE WAY IT ’S BEEN DONE SINCE THE TELETYPE . Start small.

In India, very user friendly “Electronic Voting Machines” are used. These are so user friendly that even illiterate people can use them easily. These devices have been used successfully across the country in various climatic conditions. More information can be found here: http://www.eci.gov.in/faq/evm.asp

If USA had a better ballot system than what it has currently, then Al Gore might have been the President, and the earth might have been safer.