of State Election Directors (NASED) president and Design for Democracy advisor. Since voting is almost exclusively by mail, clarity in election materials is essential in Oregon; Design for Democracy was commissioned by the state to work on a similar set of materials. In 2005, following its work in Oregon, Design for Democracy partnered with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop the first national ballot design

pendent vocabulary to support local production of voting materials; to expand the body of knowledge and library of best practices shared among election officials and designers serving citizens; and to offer pragmatic recommendations grounded in the realities of diverse polling environments, citizenship, legislative imperatives, and production environments.

To meet this last goal, the
project focused on attainable,
near-term recommendations

embarked on a two-year, iterative, user-centered design project—led by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, Elizabeth Hare, and a strong advisory board—to develop the EAC’s “Effective Designs for the Administration of Federal Elections.”

The Design for Democracy project team developed original ballot and voter information material prototypes, based on prior work in Illinois and Oregon and using generic sample language from NIST.

 

September + October 2009

interactions

principles. Later that year, the EAC sought out Design for Democracy as a partner in the research and design of national guidelines for HAVA-compliant election design.

In September 2005 the EAC awarded Design for Democracy a major research contract to identify a series of voluntary guidelines and samples for ballots and voter-information materials. Goals for the project were: to make voting more trustworthy, efficient, convenient, practical, and gratifying; to establish a visual language with a uniform, vendor-inde-

rather than blue-sky election design reform. The research team selected the most common and ubiquitous voting equipment: optical scan and direct recording electronic (DRE). Their study was limited to traditional input methods, since alternative modes of interaction (e.g., via audio or blow straw) tend to be very manufacturer specific. The voting materials studied were limited to those at the polling place on Election Day, from identification signage to voting instructions.

With this scope in place, Design for Democracy

Many alternative versions were designed to enable isolated study of color use, iconography, graphics, layout, content organization, simultaneous presentation of multiple languages, and accommodation of character sets from multiple languages.

Prototypes were compliant with relevant national legislation and guidelines (HAVA, the Voting Rights Act, ADA guidelines), informed by existing research (from NIST, the National Institute for Literacy, the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and oth-