The (design) fix is in
In a stunning turnabout, Chicago and Cook County have become national leaders in election reform

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published March 16, 2004

When the confusing "butterfly ballot" in Florida's Palm Beach County threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, a little light went off in a lot of people's heads: Elections don't just happen. They're designed. Which means they can be mis-designed.

While Florida was the prime example of bad ballot layout four years ago, Chicago and Cook County had their own ballot design fiasco: a cluttered facing-page layout that confronted voters deciding whether to retain sitting Cook County Circuit Court judges. It was so perplexing that scores of people complained that they voted for Judge A when they meant to vote against Judge B.

But when city and county voters go to the polls for Tuesday's primary election, they will encounter a redesigned batch of election materials, from posters to ballot pages to voting instructions, that have made Chicago and Cook County national leaders in reforming election design.

Seen against the back of Chicago's sordid history of rigged elections which reached its low point in 1960, when the dead allegedly helped elect John F. Kennedy president the new materials represent a stunning turnabout.

Not only are the ballot pages and other materials crisply designed, they render the entire election process less intimidating, more legible and ultimately, one hopes, more trustworthy. That's precisely what graphic design is supposed to do: make the complex clear. It allows us to do things intuitively rather than puzzle over them.

Designing the reforms required changes in state law. Illinois, like other states, had minute requirements, such as a rule that stated, with the authority of the 10 Commandments, that candidates' names shall appear only in capital letters.

"When you try and explain to people that you had to have the law changed to use lower-case letters, they're simply incredulous," said Scott Burnham, the director of communications for Cook County Clerk David Orr.

Graphic designers have long been excluded from shaping ballots and other election material. Instead, the real designers have been election officials, printers, typesetters and those who write state election codes. To anyone who cares about the relationship between design and democracy, that ought to be frightening. Most of these people have no idea how to lay out an easy-to-read ballot.

Consider the saga of Theresa LePore, the Palm Beach County Election Supervisor who designed the infamous "butterfly ballot."

Four years ago, she thought she was doing a favor for Palm Beach County's thousands of senior citizens when she put the names of the presidential and vice presidential candidates in large letters that would be easy to read. Then that dictum about the road to hell being paved with good intentions took over.

A single page could not contain the names of 10 pairs of candidates for president and vice president. So LePore placed the names on facing pages with a single row of punch holes in between. The facing pages resembled the wings of the butterfly thus the name "butterfly ballot." Democrat Al Gore's name was second on the list of candidates on the left page. But the hole that needed to be punched for Gore was third from the top.

Later, many of the elderly voters LePore was trying to help said they thought they were voting for Gore but had mistakenly cast their ballots for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan, whose name was opposite Gore's on the right page. Gore, of course, lost Florida and, with it, the election.

"That's going to be on my tombstone," LePore said by phone last week. "No good deed goes unpunished."

In Cook County, there were more good intentions and more widespread voter confusion.

Bilingualism run amok

Bilingualism is a good thing, right? We want Spanish-speaking voters to understand the ballot as well as English-speaking voters. But the 2000 Cook County judicial retention ballot was a case of bilingualism run amok.

The question, Shall So-and-So be retained as judge of the Cook County Circuit Court, appeared not once, but twice (once each in English and Spanish), around each judge's name. On a typical page, the same question appeared 18 times. On a two-page spread, that multiplied to 36 times, something like the brooms in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice." The questions took up so much room that the size of the candidates' names had to be reduced dramatically, becoming not simply shorter but thinner. The names were even harder to decipher because they were all capitalized, lacking the breaks of white space that make a blend of upper and lowercase letters easy to read.

And the trouble didn't stop there.

Because the judicial retention question was hogging so much room, the candidate names, in an arrangement similar to Palm Beach County's, were spread over facing pages with punch-holes in between.

The hole that represented a "Yes" vote for Judge A was directly above the hole that allowed a "Yes" vote for Judge B. But the "No" vote for Judge A was below the "Yes" vote for Judge B. Many voters later complained that this interweaving confused them, causing them to punch "Yes" for Judge A when they meant "No" for Judge B.

The furor that arose from these botched designs and the televised specter of election officials holding up Florida punch-card ballots to the light in attempt to divine the voter's intent led millions of Americans to realize that the election system they never thought twice about was, in fact, riddled with glitches. Two years later, Congress passed and President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, which, among other things, allocated millions of dollars to replace outdated punch-card machines with more advanced touch-screen and optical-scan technology.

Chicago and Cook County don't plan to get rid of their punch-card machines until 2006, but that's OK. Critics charge that the computerized touch-screen systems are vulnerable to hackers or can crash, and that they leave no paper trail that can be checked in case of vote fraud. Besides, the machines may turn out to be an expensive quick fix a way of reacting to the problem of election design without carefully thinking it through.

A Chicago team has done that intellectual heavy lifting, and the results are exemplary.

Calling in the pros

The leader of the team, which includes graphic designers, teachers and students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, is Marcia Lausen, an associate professor of graphic design at the school and a principal of the firm Studio/lab. The team worked with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, which signed on to the redesign immediately after the 2000 election, and the Cook County Clerk's office, which joined the effort and has taken the drive to reshape the election process even further than the city.

The team also has done a new ballot design for the State of Oregon, which votes by mail. Next month, the New York-based American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) will publish the team's work in a book, "Election Design: Models for Improvement."

The book provides officials nationwide with templates for better election design. What already has happened in Chicago and Cook County shows that these models can work. Yet as the team learned, you need much more than a pencil or a computer mouse to reshape a ballot.

You need to change the law.

To clean up Cook County's crowded judicial retention ballot, city and county officials had to press the Illinois General Assembly to pass legislation that freed the designers from the grip of outdated regulations.

Passed in 2001, the measure canceled the mandate to print the retention question next to each judge's name. It also allowed candidates' names to be printed in lowercase, as well as uppercase, letters.

Presumably, capital letters were required in the first place because someone thought they would stand out. But when everything tries to stand out, nothing does.

"It's the good intentions of non-designers," Lausen said. She was astonished, she added, that a law was needed to change the ballot layout.

"I've never encountered in my professional experience a layout dictated by law," she said. "I've had opinionated clients. But there's never been a law."

The changes allowed the team to create new and far more legible judicial retention ballot pages, which first appeared, along with new posters and signs, in 2002 and will be seen again on this year's November general election ballot. The principles that shaped those pages, however, have been applied throughout the city and county ballot and will be evident to those who cast their votes Tuesday.

With the retention question appearing just twice per page (once in English and Spanish) instead of 18 times, so much room has been freed up that all the candidates' names can appear on a single page rather than two facing pages. That's good. With all the names in a single vertical column, you always vote to the right of the name. No more crossover confusion.

A readable ballot

In addition, the candidates' names appear in a newly readable mix of upper- and lowercase letters. And they are larger than anything else on the page, creating a clear hierarchy. Better yet, each name is surrounded by a curving outline that leads the eye directly to the punch holes. Best of all, the design assumes that something can go wrong. If you spoil your ballot, instructions on the ballot say, then ask the judge for a new one.

Fortunately, the Chicago design team did not stop with redesigning the ballots. The ultimate strength of their effort is that it considers the entire election experience, as if voting was a brand and that brand could be marketed as successfully as the coffee beans they sell at Starbucks.

So, like all brands, there's a logo an energetic group of lowercase letters that exclaims, "vote!" It almost makes voting seem hip.

As in stores, there are signs to get people in the door bright red posters that are crisp and easy to read even when they are printed in three languages (English, Spanish and Chinese), as required by law. Within the polling place, again following the store model, signs help voters find their way around. The signs also try to reduce the anxiety that many voters typically experience as they stand in line before casting their ballots.

The signs have a patriotic color code red for instruction, blue for information. More important, they come with well-placed, clear-as-a-bell diagrams, like those inside the voting booth that spell out how to your punch card into the machine.

The feedback officials hear from voters "has been all positive," said Orr, referring to comments he got after the 2002 election. "They say this seems to clean it up."

Cook County has gone even further in its election redesign than Chicago, with new manuals for the election judges who set up the polling places. There's also a new packet of absentee ballot materials that is being used for the first time this year. Typically, county officials say, the fees for the new designs have been just a few thousand dollars.

Cynics undoubtedly will charge that election design reform is merely a full employment act for graphic designers. But does it make sense to spend millions of dollars on new election equipment while ignoring the simple and relatively inexpensive design changes that are so crucial to restoring voters' trust?

Chicago and Cook County are ready for election design reform.

What about the rest of America?

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A new and improved voting experience

1. BRANDING

Graphic designers created an energetic logo as part of their redesign of election materials for Chicago and Cook County. The logo has been used on posters, banners and even the side of a van.

2. POSTERS

Instead of an old-fashioned poster festooned with American flags, the new model conveys essential information crisply and clearly and in three languages (English, Spanish and Chinese).

3. MANUALS FOR ELECTION JUDGES

The judges are crucial to the process, responsible for such important behind-the-scenes tasks as setting up the polling place. Cook County's new manual does a far better job of showing them how than the old manual did.

4. BALLOTS

A facing-page ballot (below) used by voters choosing whether to retain sitting Cook County Circuit Court judges was a source of enormous confusion in 2000. A far more legible new model (left) has replaced it. The big step in that transformation: City and county officials engineered a change in state law that allows upper- and lowercase letters. Previously, the law required all capital letters. The new legislation also lets the judicial retention question Shall So-and-So be retained as a judge be stated only twice per page instead of 18 times. Ovals around the judges' names help guide the voter to the punch holes.

- NEWLY DESIGNED BALLOT

- PREVIOUS BALLOT

5. VOTING INSTRUCTIONS

The old instruction poster was as cluttered as Grandma's Victorian house. The new one puts far greater emphasis on diagrams that show voters how to handle the ballot. It's posted right where you need to see it on the wall of the voting booth.