The election season is upon us, and we are already experiencing the impact of poor design. Not that bad design and voting is anything new. Whitney Quesenbery and the Center for Civic Design is trying to change that. Listen to how a failed attempt at dancing led to Whitney's career in user experience, how a chance assignment led to her work in civic design, and what is being done to help design better elections and voting experiences.
Whitney Quesenbery has had a long and influential career in user experience. The author of three books on UX, Whitney has been involved in a lot of projects aimed at making things more usable. But perhaps none of her work is as important as her co-founding and co-directing the Center for Civic Design. Whitney talks about her unintended introduction into the world of experience design through a theater class, her early work in UX as being user-centric, and how a committee assignment through the Usability Professionals Association led to her life's work on civic design and voting experiences. Listen to her talk about the UX tragedy of the 'butterfly ballot' in the 2000 election, how big experiences come from simple changes, and what people can do to help design better elections.
Experience by Design Podcast
Whitney Quesenbery on Voter Experience and Civic Design
February 4, 2020
(Unedited Transcript)
Gary:
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Experience By Design podcast. We explore experience designs of all kinds. I'm Gary David and I'll be handling the duties for this week. Well, folks, it's official. We are now in election season. It does seem like election season never ended given that after the last election it seemed like we were into the next election and that the election season lasts all year long. It's kind of like the weather in San Diego, everything just kind of blends together because there's no clear demarcation between one season and the next.
But we did have our first primarily last night, as I'm recording this. The Iowa caucuses. In my opinion, if you ask me, and of course no one is asking me, if you can't easily explain a process, maybe you might want to rethink now that process is designed. I was chatting with my mom the other day and she asked me to explain why the Iowa caucuses are important. And I told her, in all honesty, they're not important. And I couldn't have been more correct.
Now, I know in some larger sense, there is importance to the Iowa caucuses. Favored candidates can have disappointing nights or surprise candidates can shock everybody and start to build momentum. But overall, what impact do they actually have? Especially when the Iowa caucuses and primary night is completely FUBAR. And you don't know what FUBAR means, do yourself a favor and look it up. We have no winner declared, conspiracy theories about why we have no winner declared, crashed apps, confused pundits, and corn dogs at state fairs.
And if you have to feel sorry for anybody, you can feel sorry for the candidates who spent a lot of time at state fairs eating corn dogs. I've never had a corn dog or been to an Iowa state's fair but I think I can go all my life without doing either. And it is a perfect time for our guest today, Whitney Quesenbery, who is the co-founder and co-director for The Center for Civic Design. Now, the center is fascinating and it describes itself in the following way: To us, democracy is a design problem. The centerpiece of solving that problem is ensuring voter intent through design. Our goa is to make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant.
I think you'll agree with me that these are very lofty ambitions and ambitions that were never more important than they are now. I personally do have fond memories of voting when I was young. I would go into these giant booths. And I don't know if you've had the same experience of those gigantic election booths where as soon as you went in, you pulled the lever, the curtain would close behind you, and you were stared with these other large levers that you had to pull down to vote for your candidate. And it somehow seemed as those curtains closed, that you were in this sacred space. This gigantic machinery of the booth symbolizing the gigantic machinery of our democracy.
It was this representation of our civic ideals in action. Everything I was being taught about in school, this idea of one person and one vote, with each vote counting the same. And I grew up looking forward to being able to vote, to being able to take my place in this historic process. This grand experiment of democracy. Taking pride in this right, which is fundamental to our society. And of course, early on in my life, being very young, it was a right that I naively thought everyone shared equally. Of course, voting and voter experience is not equal and has never been equal in American history.
We can go back to how people had to fight and die for the right to vote, especially African-Americans in the south. In a more contemporary sense, we can think about the striking down of the voting rights act. We can think about and read about voter purges and disenfranchisement which is ongoing. We have faulty voting equipment, especially if you're in poorer neighborhoods and you have outdated voting equipment. We have hanging chads and spoiled votes. Trying to understand voter intent by virtue of some mark or a sign made on a pice of paper which may or may not be discernible.
We have voter IDs and provisional ballots. Those provisional ballots, not even sure after we make that ballot whether it's going to be counted or not. Just trusting in the system to work. And of course, we have voting machines and unsecured systems. And we have potential for great hacking by foreign powers. And the list unfortunately goes on and on. And with all of that, it's easy to get discouraged. It's easy to lose trust and faith in what you think is the very foundation of your society.
While many of us may have took this election process for granted, in all honestly, I don't know how many of us do now, except, of course, for my students who apparently don't think about voting at all, and that's another depressing story for another depressing podcast. But taking all this together, it really does create this sense of challenging our faith in this election process. How much faith do we have in it and how much can we be sure that when we go into that booth or we fill out that piece of paper that our intent is being recorded?
This is why this is a great time for this podcast and a conversation with Whitney, who highlights the tremendous amount of work that is being done by many different kids of people across the system to make voting accessible, transparent, and secure. We talk about the challenges large and small of creating a voting experience through civic design. How, interestingly enough, her inability to dance led to her career in UX. How little things can make for big experiences in voting and just in experience design. And finally, how participatory civic design is essential for a participatory democracy.
So take heart, have faith, and enjoy our conversation with Whitney.
Speaker 1:
(singing)
Gary:
How are you?
Whitney:
Excellent. I'm great. How are you? Did you have a good holiday?
Gary:
Yeah. It was not bad. It was good to get the kids back to school yesterday.
Whitney:
Yes. It was good to get the house guests gone.
Gary:
Right. I mean, you guys are great. I love you, but you need to go now and let someone else deal with you for a little while.
Whitney:
You're not putting that on the air, are you? Your children will never forgive you.
Gary:
Oh, well, there's plenty of worse that I'm sure I've said to them. But it's just one of those things where too much of a good thing and the need for structure and for engagement and the stimulation that I just cannot provide, it seems.
Whitney:
Yeah. I also think it's habit. I mean, this is actually one of the reasons why I don't think that elections should be on a holiday or on a Saturday, because what do you do on a holiday? Other things, right? But when elections are on a weekday, it fits into your normal life and if you have early voting over a period of time, then you can choose when you fit it into your life so you get the choice but you also get elections as part of daily life.
Gary:
It is an interesting point, just to jump into the topic of elections, and it's always been one of the befuddling things, how Tuesday, I suppose the second Tuesday in November, right? Or is it the first Tuesday? I can't even remember. It's the first or second Tuesday.
Whitney:
The Tuesday after the first Monday.
Gary:
The Tuesday after the first Monday because I think the reason had something to do with the harvest being in and people-
Whitney:
Harvest is done and Tuesday was a market day.
Gary:
Right. And here we are.
Whitney:
So it fit into daily life, right? It fit into a agrarian daily life.
Gary:
Yeah. I don't know to what extent our elections today actually fits into our daily lives. And there's always this trade off between tradition and history and the constitution and law but also what's practical and meaningful just even around technology. For me, my earliest memories of elections actually was going into the voting booth where you pulled the lever. My mom did, my dad did.
Whitney:
Where did you grow up?
Gary:
I grew up in Michigan just outside Detroit. And to even be more specific, because this does matter in how elections are administered, it was in Grosse Point, Michigan, Grosse Point Park. So just across the road, Alter Drive and Mack Avenue from Detroit. And you'd pull the lever, the curtain would automatically close. They would play with the knobs and then we'd do the lever and then we'd walk out.
Whitney:
It's so interesting. I grew up in New York City where we also had lever machines. And when I talk to people about their earliest memories of elections or their earliest recollections, if they grew up in a place with lever machines, they tend to have this incredibly strong memory. You see people actually doing the [inaudible 00:09:46] and then the lever, and they take their hand and they pull it across and they go, "It and went ka-chunk." That was such a visceral memory about how we voted.
Gary:
I think so. And it was just one of those things where you just did it. Now, again, that's from my very narrow lens of growing up in essentially a suburb of Detroit. But at the same time, it wasn't one of those things where not voting was ever a thought. I just assumed everyone voted and that's just what you did and when I turned 18, I voted.
Whitney:
Yeah. It is so social. The people who have had people in their family who vote are at such an advantage to people who haven't. That means that if you're from a historically disadvantaged community and you're the first in your family to vote or you're in an immigrant family and you're the first in your family to vote, you have so many fewer traditions to draw on and assumptions to draw on about how this happens.
Gary:
Yeah. I actually would like to go back a little bit. You've been doing civic design for a while but that's now all you've done. I was looking at the work you've done in user experience. How did you get started in user experience in the first place?
Whitney:
Oh gosh. I worked in theater. I was a lighting designer.
Gary:
Of course. I figured that would be the direct trajectory from lighting design to ballot design.
Whitney:
Well, it is. I mean, lighting design in theater is about creating the atmosphere and experience, right? But, no. The real connection was that I could write. I had a friend who was working for a company that was doing something with this really interesting new thing called hypertext and they needed someone to write some documentation. They said, "We can't find anybody. You could write. You're between shows. Why don't you do this?" The next thing I knew, I'd switched careers.
Gary:
Was all your education in lighting design and theater and productions and things like that?
Whitney:
No. I had a general bachelor's undergraduate degree in English literature.
Gary:
Wow. But that's interesting because that then ... You said you knew how to write and one of the things that you're doing today is talking about using plain language. So how do you get from English literature, which ... I mean, just any English literature? Are we talking about Shakespearian, which is not plain language? At the time, I guess it was plain language, right?
Whitney:
It was plain language. I went to a liberal arts college so I got that education. My parents were academics. I came out of school believing you could do anything you wanted to do with that degree. I didn't realize the truth yet but I'd started to do theater because you had to take gym, but dance counted as gym and the dance department was really happy to see someone who was a complete klutz and couldn't get across the floor without tripping over her feet but who was happy to do the lights.
Gary:
Nice.
Whitney:
Right? Yeah. So that got me into lighting. And I think actually the literature background, being able to read a play, was all good. And you learned tons about history and social because you have to do all the research about setting for the play. And then I wandered into hypertext, which at the time was really interactive. People were doing interactive fiction and really interesting things. And my career has really just been one thing leading to another in odd and interesting ways.
Gary:
The lighting part is fascinating to me because of you go to a concert or any kind of show and any kind of production and it's such a pivotal piece of the experience but one that I don't know many people consciously think about. Can you go to a play or to any kind of show and not think about it or is that something you always notice now?
Whitney:
I've worked so hard to be able to just go to a show and not ... I mean, I look around. But if I'm really noticing it, it's a bad job. I got into theater because I liked theater, not because I liked lighting technology. Lighting was just what I did. To me, it's how plays communicate emotion. Movies do it with pacing. I mean, everybody does it with pacing and music and things like that. But lighting is how the director and the lighting director tell the audience what to pay attention to.
Gary:
Interesting. And when you got into UX with hypertext, if we wanted to place it in terms of jargon, there wasn't a user experience at that time, was there? I mean, what was it being called at that moment?
Whitney:
The company I worked for was calling it usability engineering because, of course, everybody takes a word and tries to fit it into the existing systems. There were software engineers so we were usability engineers. And we believed in usability testing. We talked about getting out and understanding people and all the right things. The guy who ran the company was a cognitive psychologist. But I have to say that last year I probably did direct user research with more people than I did in my whole career at Cognetics because we were still fighting to get people to let you do anything. And now it's so changed to being something that's much more normal.
Gary:
Yeah, it is. And I think I mentioned to you on my emails, I teach in a UX graduate program. It's actually called Human Factors, which also dates that, the origins of the program. But I do get that sense, and I've not worked in it as a professional, but I do get the sense still that people have to fight for attention, and not necessarily for a place to belong, but for a place in the process. I mean, where does it fit in? How much do we listen to it? How many resources do we have? How important is it really? To what extent do we have to talk to the people we're designing for? Do we assume we know them because they've always been our customers, and of course, we know what they want?
Whitney:
Yes. I think this is always true. It's so easy to focus on the production, the means of production, those tangible things, if you think of software as tangible. But even when we say we're really thinking about our customers or we're thinking about our users, they're the people who aren't in the room. Excuse me. They're the people who are not actually on the team. But the early days of user centered design didn't envision UX as let's do a few usability tests. They actually envisioned deep involvement of the people for whom the software was being made. All the participatory design work that came out of Scandinavia was about engaging the people who worked in the factor and perhaps in creating how computerization and how software would fit into their work instead of assuming that an expert was going to come in, listen to a few insights and wave a magic wand.
Gary:
There's a really great book, I don't know if you're familiar with it because you brought up Scandinavia, called Design At Work.
Whitney:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Gary:
And it goes back. I mean, you can kind of find it on Amazon. It's not still in publication, or your local bookstore maybe if you're not into Amazon. It goes I think back to a 1991 conference in Scandinavia that created I think a list of user principles, a user's bill of rights, if you will. And it was fascinating for me as a sociologist who's not from the psychological background, although I have a bachelor's in psychology, that it seemed like of course. Of course you would want to talk to your users. Of course you would want to engage them in the process. Of course you would want to think about the larger social implications of whatever thing you're designing and implementing. And of course all design is political.
Gary:
On one hand, it seemed this whole computer supported cooperative work world, the CSVW world that was born out of that Scandinavian tradition, should have been obvious. But I think it also speaks to how far away things moved from that, that it wasn't for people who worked in the profession and they needed that flag in the ground to say, "No. These things are important. We need to consider them."
Whitney:
I don't know whether this is historically accurate, but my theory is that the whole idea of UX began to take off just about the time there were enough computer cycles to be able to pay attention to the interface. When it wasn't just a miracle that the computer could do the computation at all. And I think that UX, maybe that was where usability testing came in or UI design. But where UX came in was when we all got smart phones and we started to see these incredibly powerful computers in the hands of everyday people.
Whitney:
It was when that transformation from the computer as a specialized device to the computer as an everyday device happened that we began to really think about how we include people in this. And I would like you to start upfront and think about it and really understand your audience, invite your audience in, invite them in to be participants, not just audience or users. But it's also true that we see things along long beta periods, so we see people getting to try things before it becomes the full product. So maybe that exactly how it happens changes.
Whitney:
Many years ago at this point I was doing a project for National Cancer Institute that took me into some local hospitals and I went to one in the middle of Pennsylvania and they were describing how they added new features to their electronic health records. They said, "We sent our staff out to the medical group that we're going to be working for and they bring this came called Cantasia with them and then record what people are doing and they come back with ideas." I said, "We have a word for all this." They said, "Oh, yeah. We just don't use those words. We try not to make it mysterious sounding."
Whitney:
They had a very mature EHR at that point. One of the things that had happened in that period of time and by involving people directly was that the best ideas they had about what they should be doing and what features were needed were now coming from the medical unit and not from the IT group.
Gary:
Right. You're speaking my language. I teach a course on ethnography in the program and this is what we like to talk about. For me, I've been teaching this class for 10 years now. When I was initially asked to teach it, I had no idea what UX, UI, any of these things were. I was just the ethnographer. I was an ethnographer who studies workplaces and I study, amongst other things, technology in workplaces. As a sociologist, that's it. And then to get this ah-ha moment for people of the user is the person using the technology, not the person buying. That might be the customer, but the user is somebody different. And then getting to the politics of, and this also relates to the election piece, of who you're designing for. Who are you trying to please? The decision maker and what they're looking for, the user and what they're looking for, all of the above and more of an ecosystem approach? A lot of people now, thankfully-
Whitney:
Oddly enough.
Gary:
Are thinking in terms of systems, of how all of these things are interrelated and connected, which for me, at least, goes full circle back to the Scandinavian folks who are talking about computer supported cooperative work in this socially embedded understanding of technology and design, which is not just about an individual user and their ability to navigate a screen, although it's that too, but these larger implications of systems that are both the person's embedded in directly and indirectly through being in larger institutions.
Whitney:
Yeah. When we started Center for Civic Design, we were thinking about to create a better voter experience, right? So how to demystify the language, write it in plain language, how to make the interactions easier, how to make sure that when someone took the time and effort to go have their voice heard and cast a vote that the things they meant to say were actually what we heard. And then we very quickly realized that in order to do this, you had to really understand election offices because they are the facilitators of the election process. And it took a little while but we then realized how many things that they do are constrained by law or custom or the voting systems they've chosen or just how their state is organized.
Whitney:
And so we began to think about what kind of policies help create a good election experience and that creates a good voter experience. And things like we see policies that are good, well intentioned policies, but they're implemented badly because in the law they write the words so they say things like, "Will be registered to vote unless they affirmatively decline." And now you're stuck designing a form that meets a law that requires an affirmative decline.
Gary:
Right, affirmative decline.
Whitney:
What's an affirmative decline? What they mean is give them a chance to opt out or give them a chance to say no. But how do you get someone to say no without asking them to say yes? So all of these design issues stem from how the people creating the new policy tried to turn that into language for a law. And so we began to think about plain language and laws. How do you actually start the process by thinking about what the experience will be like and then writing a law that says make this experience.
Gary:
And when you talk about The Center for Civic Design, before I jump into too much of the nuts and bolts of this, is this a bar conversation that you're having? Like, "You know what we should do? Create a center for civic design." How does this even become a thing that we should do this, we need to make this happen?
Whitney:
Oh gosh. It was a funny long history. In 2000 there was a big election in the United States, you might remember.
Gary:
I do remember it.
Whitney:
I was also elected to the board of what was then Usability Professionals Association. And they said to me, "You're going to be in charge of outreach. Go do something about elections." I thought, "What do I know? I'm a UX researcher. What do I know about this?" But I knew how to listen and I went to conferences and I ended up on a federal committee for voting system guidelines. Dana Chisnell, who founded the organization with me, ended up doing some of the research that supported the development of the federal guidelines. And every once in a while we think, "Well, should we make this real?" And we think, "No. It's a lot of work to start an organization. Let's just keep doing some things on the side. It's just fine." We met people, we talked to people.
Whitney:
One day, we did an NSF grant through the University of Minnesota looking at how systems interact with poll workers in the polling place and how all of that contributes to running a good election. And meanwhile in California, a foundation had started a project called The Future of California Elections that brought together election officials, get out to vote groups, all the rights groups, and said, "If we work together instead of in oppositional advocacy, maybe we could make something amazing happen." And, in fact, one of the outcomes of that group has been the new election system in California. And they had a call for proposals for some work to do things like make voter information easier to use.
Whitney:
Someone said, "You guys should do this." They said, "You have to be a nonprofit. You have to at least be an organization. We have to have somewhere to send the check." And so we decided that was how we founded The Center for Civic Design was in response to a project that was big enough to make it worth taking the work we were doing and putting it into an organization. And that was in 2013 and we've been going strong ever since.
Gary:
For those who don't remember or might not be familiar with the 2000 election, the first thing that comes to my mind is the book by John Nichols called Jews for Buchanan.
Whitney:
Yes, I have that.
Gary:
And the butterfly ballot that happened in Palm Beach, Florida.
Whitney:
Right. So the Palm Beach story is actually a UX tragedy because what happened was that an election director in a populous county with a lot of retirees thought the text on our ballot is very small and we have a lot of older adults and we know older adults need larger text and by making the text larger, she forced more vertical space into the ballot. The solution to that is to alternate left, right, left, right with the names and with the marking selections down the middle. So by trying to solve a design problem but not thinking about the entire user experience, she created a design problem that changed world history.
Gary:
Essentially, yeah. I mean, that's putting it accurately. Did you ever have a chance to talk with the person who was responsible for this? Because I remember at the time, at the time when this was going on, a lot of theories about this was done by ... It was Secretary of State Harris in Florida to make sure of that and all these conspiracy theorists were coming out and it turns out that this person was trying to do a good thing who ended up doing an unintentional thing through poor design.
Whitney:
Right. I mean, I did speak to her. She actually lost ... It's an elected position. She actually lost her position in the next election. But in between, she bought new voting systems and she did a really good job in training all the poll workers. So I think one of the challenges of elections is you get one shot at it. It's an entirely a design problem by exceptions. The things that happen when a design problem causes enough perturbations in the election system to make a difference, it's because there's some sort of perfect storm. So things that you get away with when you have a short ballot become a problem when you have a long ballot.
Whitney:
In California in 2016, they had an open senatorial seat for the first time. And because of the way their primary works, it's an open primary and the top two people in that primary go on to the general election. They had 35 candidates for senate. 34 plus a write in. The problem with that wasn't the number of candidates, although that leads to some other problems in elections. The problem was that they couldn't fit all of those names in one column on the ballot. One of the things that we know from both what we know from the research but also from empirical evidence from elections is that when you split a contest across two columns, people have a tendency to vote in both columns. They miss the fact that it was one.
Whitney:
In fact, their over votes were higher. But the over votes weren't as bad as they might have been because the election officials noticed this and started fussing around about it and talking to each other and they brought us into the conversation and we worked with a couple of counties and they did testing. And we tried different [inaudible 00:29:14] and one of the heroes of this was the ballot layout person who figured out that by just tweaking things a little bit, she could fit it on the back, even though you couldn't fit it on the front. And so the counties each made their decisions about how they were going to take their voting system and their particular ballot layout problems and try to get this into one column so that people would not over vote.
Whitney:
But you don't plan for those crazy things to happen or you have to plan for something crazy to happen, you just don't know what it's going to be this election. And so part of what we see as our job is to help election officials be more resilient, to help them think if I'm trying something new, why don't I set up a table downstairs in the county building lobby and just intercept some people and get them to try it out so we know what will happen.
Gary:
Right.
Whitney:
We just worked with the state of Michigan on an amazing project. It's the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. It was voted in as a constitutional amendment in 2018. New secretary of state came in and launched herself and her department into working on it. We ended up working on the application to be a commissioner on this commission. We traveled to seven cities and towns. They did testing with 44 people plus all of the usual open comment from groups. Not counting the micro changes, we designed that application 11 times. We had special projects staff from the secretary of state's office not coming along with us on the testing, doing testing with us.
Gary:
The secretary of state?
Whitney:
Not the secretary of state herself, but her staff.
Gary:
Okay. Her staff, got you.
Whitney:
Secretary of state did something that no one's ever done. In Michigan the secretary of state also runs the DMVs and she visited every single branch office, got out into the field and from the upper peninsula to the middle of Detroit, east and west, the whole state, went to every single office to get to know the people both behind the counters and in the waiting room.
Gary:
When you were going around to the seven cities and towns in Michigan, how many times did people put up their hand to show you where you were going next? That's what we do in Michigan. You got to hold up your hand like a mitten to say this is where you are and this is where you're going to travel next, because Michigan is obviously shaped like a hand.
Whitney:
Well, the person who did that work for us is Christopher Patton. He is a member of our team. And he is local and he lives in Detroit so we had people-
Gary:
Perfect.
Whitney:
And the secretary of state's office. We spent a lot of time thinking about where we should go when we did testing for their new automatic voter registration, New Motor Voter, automatic voter registration. We spent a lot of time thinking about making sure that we were going to branch off to do the testing that were in communities that were diverse and different means of being diverse. So we wanted to go to rural places. But we also wanted to go to places like inner cities where there's longer waits. We wanted to make sure we were going to places where there were people who spoke different languages, all the many rich ethnic groups that live in Detroit, in Michigan. And we really spent some time thinking about how to make sure we were seeing participants who as much as we could do it in the time allotted looked like Michigan. We didn't go to the upper peninsula. I wish we had, but we didn't.
Gary:
You didn't go to the UP?
Whitney:
Nope.
Gary:
It's pretty up there. You can go across the bridge. It's a bit of a drive but I used to go up there and vacation. It's nice. It's different. I mean, it's very culturally ... We actually got the UP when we almost went to war with Ohio over Toledo. So we got it from Wisconsin. So that's the history of the UP. That's why they talk so different up there.
Whitney:
Okay.
Gary:
But it is very culturally distinct. For those who are listening, we do have listeners from around the world actually, they might find a lot of this confusing in terms of the ways in which the US election system works. But even for federal elections, the manner in which these things are administered is on a state level basis and then you can get down to a county level basis in terms of how the actual technology-
Whitney:
And townships.
Gary:
And townships.
Whitney:
In New England and in upper Midwest, a township or a city runs the election. Now, there's an advantage to this. It's really local, right? That means that there's some decision making about what will serve your community best. But the state does the states, because we're a federal system, the states set the basic rules. When the state of Michigan changed their absentee voting to be no excuse, so anybody could vote by mail, they also designed an envelope. They had a committee get together and work with us on the design for the envelops for the vote by mail ballots to make sure they would go through the postal system well and to make sure that voters would recognize them when they arrived.
Whitney:
In that case, our ecosystem was 1600 townships, a state, millions of voters, of course, but also the postal system automation was a stakeholder in our design.
Gary:
Interesting. Because it would have to be because of the expansion. Especially, I think it's in Oregon, isn't it exclusively by mail?
Whitney:
Oh gosh. Oregon, Washington. Oregon started it but it's now Washington, Colorado, Utah, and California is in transition. Vote by mail is growing rally rapidly. If anybody wants to see a wonderful map showing the progression, the Vote at Home Institute, Voteathome.org, has been tracking this progress and sees it as a progression. You don't just go from everybody votes in a polling place on Tuesday to everybody votes by mail ballot. I think the really interesting models in California and Colorado and some of the newer states coming on board is not just that it's either vote by mail or go to the office, they actually set up vote centers where you can vote anywhere in the county and those centers focus on assisting people who might be new to voting and need help, who might have disability issues and need help, who might just like going there or in some way feel that voting in person is better for them.
Whitney:
So now we have a situation in which the poll workers or the election workers can focus their time on helping the people who need the most help and people who want to vote by mail, and it's not even vote by mail anymore. In Colorado 70% of the ... 75, 70 something of the ballots are returned not through the postal system but to a drop box that are scattered around the county. So it's a direct-
Gary:
Interesting.
Whitney:
Direct back to the ... And in California a lot of people show up at the polls with their vote by mail ballot to drop them off at the polling place. They'll come, one person in the family might have already voted but has their mail ballot. The other person is voting in person. They come together and one votes in person at the polling place and the other drops off their ballot. The preserves some of the social aspect of voting. But while giving people more time, also this comes with early voting. Because that means that those vote centers are open for usually 11 days before the election. So if someone who needs to register, also those states have election day registration. Now there's a place to go where it can be handled accurately and promptly.
Gary:
When you mentioned the 2000 election, I mean, we didn't even start talking about Ohio with the long waits with secretary of state Ken Blackwell who was also the chairman of President Bush's reelection campaign, right? There was this whole issue at the time because this was my first year as being a professor, or actually second year at my university, so as a sociologist, it made for ample conversation in class. And the idea of long waits, and voting has always been a challenge for people of color in the United States. This wasn't a new thing. But I think it was maybe one of the first times that that conversation started to be elevated since the 1960s to a larger level of prominence around do we want to make it easier for people to vote or do we want to make it harder for people to vote?
Gary:
I remember in Michigan, the Motor Voter law that was passed when at the time Governor Engler wanted to strike it down. Motor Voters, when you go register for your license, you can register to vote at the same time.
Whitney:
Right. They can't actually strike it down. That's a federal law.
Gary:
He wanted to ... I was trying to remember. There were issues around not wanting it to be passed or not wanting it to happen. I can't remember the exact details. But I think the larger question here is we would assume, I would assume, one might assume that everybody wants everyone to be able to vote and that should be easy. But I don't know that we can assume that anymore. To what extent are people wanting to make it easier to understand ballots, to be able to vote, to understand their rights, to find polling places? And to what extent is that desire not equally shared and what are your perspectives from the center on this kind of topic?
Whitney:
Well, I think all things are true at once. My experience of working with the local election officials has been that they want people to be able to vote and they want them to be able to vote well. It's both an altruistic but it's also a self-serving thing because when it's difficult, when elections are difficult, who do they call? They don't call the secretary of state or the governor, they call their local election office. So they want things to run smoothly. And so just that.
Whitney:
But I also think you're right, that there's been some real awareness brought to the inequities that things like districting can cause or that just the allocation of equipment, knowing that there's enough hours for people to come in and vote, that there's enough equipment where they vote. We've seen some academic work that's been great from places like MIT election team who've been looking at the math of how do you decide how many voting booths you need for your voting system, for the length of your ballot, and for the number of registered voters you have and how do you make those calculations so that you can make them accurately.
Whitney:
We're all really focused on this for 2020 because every sign says that we are going to have historically high turnout. The increase in turnout between 20 ... It was a 34%. Not 34 percentage points, but 34% increase in turnout between the 2014 and 2018 mid terms. Every sign is that it's going to be high. New registrations are at record highs. There are some states that are advising their counties to have enough ballots for 100% of their voter registration because we think we're going to see numbers that top 80 and 90%.
Gary:
And when you go about doing this kind of work, to what extent is a traditional UX problem of persona development, of trying to think about a population in a location, and who we're exactly designing for. I know that there's issues around reading level or even low reading or any kind of disability and language. To what extent is this is a situation where it's not just designing for the primary target audience but for all target audience because it's an election in which everybody can be involved?
Whitney:
Absolutely. I mean, we go to a lot of election campuses now and election officials say things like, "You need think about who's in each district." Because we know that even in a state that allows very liberal or encourages vote by mail, that new voters, first time voters tend to vote in person. That makes sense. You're learning the ropes so you like to go in person where there may be someone to help you if you get into trouble and you want to see how it all works. So if you have a district that's got a high immigrant population or a young population or a college, you might want to think about provisioning your polling places with more capability to handle voters. If you have an area that has highly mobile voters, the ballot you get depends on where you live. So that means that if you're in a city where people move a lot, even between November 2018 and November 2019, people might have moved.
Whitney:
I was in the South Bronx. We were doing some in person testing on some voting systems and ballot designs and testing our messages and at the front table we screened people and we would ask people, "Are you registered to vote?" That was a simple question. And the number of I don't knows was really high. One person said, "I don't know if I'm registered to vote. I was. I voted in the last election. I lived here in these apartments right here. But then I had a fight with my boyfriend and I ended up living with my sister in Stanton Island for a while and then I went to a place out in Queens and now they've moved me back and I'm in the same apartment complex but I'm in a different building. Am I still registered to vote?"
Whitney:
The answer is actually pretty detailed. The answer might be yes. If you're in the same precinct, you can update your address but if you're not in the same precinct, maybe you can and maybe you can't. All these voter registration deadlines. These were all a product of restoration, of the post restorations, so they were designed to exclude people who didn't have regular lives, whose lives were more complex or more mobile and who had all sorts of ... So it was to create barriers.
Whitney:
And I think a lot of what we're doing is beginning to knock them down, because if we say there's a vote center and it's in your whole county or your whole city and you can go into any vote center and you can update your registration or create a registration right on the spot, then ... The deadlines are still helpful because they get people to do their paperwork early. Everybody likes not to have last minute work. But it does mean that we can meet people where they are and make that step in the voter journey easier.
Whitney:
I think when we think about elections from a structural point of view, you can see that it's a cycle, right? An election is announced and then there are candidates and there's some deadlines and ballots go out. Here's when you can vote and then here's how you count the results. It's kind of a cycle. In fact, we all talk about it as the election cycle. But for voters, that journey might not start with register to vote. That journey might start with, "Hey, there's an election. I want to vote for Joe." Or, "There's an election. What are we voting for?" So they might start way at the end of the process and then they have to back up and say, "Wait, what's this voter registration? Do I have to register? How do I register? Where do I register? What do I do?"
Whitney:
And then they might have, "Do I have to bring ID polls? Do I have that ID?" There's a couple of nonprofits who do nothing, nothing but help people who need ID get the ID they need because even the free IDs can cost money if you have to go order a duplicate copy of your birth certificate. That's going to cost something.
Gary:
Right. And this was a big issue, I know. I think it might have been Pine Ridge, I can't remember quite where. But there was an issue with getting people registered to vote and needing a street address and on the reservations there weren't streets. There weren't street names. And so there was an effort, I can't remember exactly, I think it was in South Dakota. Do I have this right?
Whitney:
It was in the Dakotas. And actually, this is a happy ending story because the tribal leadership worked with the election department to create addresses and as people came up, they updated their registration to their address. So it was a huge effort and done in a very short period of time. But that's a place where the advocates and the election officials worked together to make sure that people could vote.
Gary:
And I think there was a university involved using basically Tiger files and GPS to create street names and it was involved.
Whitney:
Yeah. I mean, there's a big movement to GIS enabled elections, right? One of the things that we're learning is that there are little mistakes in the voter files. Like you supposedly the east side of the street is in district one and the west side is in district two. Some of those houses might not be just right. So using GIS, figuring out the GIS rules. I mean, we're seeing a lot of modern technology be applied not so much to the actual voting in the polling place but to the management of elections, especially as our population just moves more, things change more. We add election districts all the time. Every 10 years we've got the census and there's redistricting. I mean, elections are not static. And helping election officials have the tools to keep up so that voter rules are accurate.
Whitney:
One of the whole ideas behind Motor Voter and now Automatic Voter Registration, which is enhanced Motor Voter, is that one thing a lot of people do is keep up either their ID from the DMV or their driver's license from the DMV. And why not keep up this other critical piece of democracy at the same time? And it sounded like such a radical thing to say that the DMV and the election office would share this data and make sure that people are being kept up to date as they move their address. In several states including Michigan, those two addresses are linked. So if you change your driver's license address, it changes your voter address, and vice versa.
Whitney:
But I think that voters don't feel that way. I think that voters think that under the dome of the capital there's a big computer system and all the departments will tap into it and so the question they have is, "Well, if I change my address on my DMV, why wouldn't they update my address everywhere else?"
Gary:
Right. Let me talk to you about Legacy Systems and silos [crosstalk 00:47:11].
Whitney:
Yeah. Let's not go there.
Gary:
Right. That's an ugly story that no one wants to hear.
Whitney:
Yeah. Because as underfunded as election offices are, DMVs are even more underfunded, although by October we will all have Real ID and that has triggered a giant update in DMV systems and that's helpful. And the other thing that the election offices have done is they've gotten together in something called ERIC, which is the Electronic Registration Information Interchange, something like that. And that is a small group of data folks who comb the postal change of address and birth and death records and for the states that are a member of it, they can say, "Here are people who we think might have moved out of the district where they're registered. They moved from the address where they're registered with you. You should follow up with them. But also, here are people who might have moved into your district who you might want to reach out to who don't look lik they're registered and you might want to make sure they are."
Whitney:
So it's both doing a cleaning of the role. They're making sure that people who move, they may register at their new place but they haven't told their old address that they've gone and so making sure that those things get kept up to date. But also making sure that we can roll out the welcome wagon for people who have moved into a new address and need to get their voter registration up to date as well.
Gary:
One of the things you brought up, which is one of the great ironies or horrible ironies, depending on your perspective, is the fact that elections are so poorly funded in what we'd like to talk about as being the greatest democracy in the world. As I was getting ready to talk to you, I was looking up some data from the Election Integrity Project and one of the things that it's stated, and this is from 2017, the US ranks among the poorest western democracies in terms of election access or election fairness or freeness. And I think for a lot of Americans at least, that would be a surprise. For some Americans it wouldn't be a surprise at all.
Gary:
But this idea that we don't fund our elections adequately, the resources to guarantee their integrity has not improved since the last election even though the threats are made to be very real. We all know what the threats are. Assessments have been made by any number of government agencies, by the senate. But at the same time, there doesn't seem to be hair on fire-
Whitney:
Oh, yes, there is.
Gary:
Is there?
Whitney:
Yeah. Among election officials, yeah. I mean, look, the Belfer Center at Harvard set up a tabletop exercise for security and I think every state has run that more than once. States and counties are beginning to adopt risk audits. It's not even but there is definitely heightened awareness of the issues and more solutions being developed to make sure that we can not only run a good election but know that we've run a good election.
Gary:
I guess I was referring to, well, in two pieces. Number one, in the public consciousness, there's ... One of the projects that I'm working on as a little side project is on digital psychiatric tools and people's use of mental health apps for their own self care. And when I would talk to clinicians about are your patients concerned regarding their privacy and security of their mental health data, they would say no. People just assumed that they have no privacy and security so it never comes up. So I think on a public level, I don't know if there's that awareness. And then at least at the senate level, the leadership in the senate, there has been no ... I know in the house there has been, but there's been no movement to pass any kind of additional funding to lead to greater election integrity.
Whitney:
Actually, there was just a new transfer funding that was passed.
Gary:
Okay.
Whitney:
But also, this is a byproduct ... I mean, I'm not excusing the senate or the leadership, but one of the byproducts of being a federal system, instead of having local counties run elections, is that there's not much that the federal government can do at the last minute. I mean, voting rights act even eviscerated the national voter registration act, which is Motor Voter. The Election Assistance Commission has been underfunded for a decade but is trying manfully to be a clearinghouse for information. The Department of Homeland Security has actually now started to pay attention, not so much to doing things for election office but to communicating with election offices, helping them monitor, helping them learn what good practices are, helping them set up defenses on their own systems.
Whitney:
So that work is happening. It's uneven. The future is always uneven. The future is unevenly distributed so there are places that are better than others. Smaller districts are probably behind because they're less well funded. A larger district has, even if they're per capita, funding isn't that great. They just have more bodies to work on things and they probably have a better IT department.
Gary:
Or an IT department at all.
Whitney:
Or an IT department ... Well, every county has one somewhere. It might not be a very big one. The whole issue of ransomware, which isn't really specifically an election issue, has made municipalities and states much more aware of the need to secure, backup, treat properly, do all the things that we get told to do to harden their systems.
Gary:
Right. One of the things I like about The Center for Civic Design, as I was looking over the materials, is in the midst of all these grand and great challenges, there's really simple stuff. One of the examples I pulled from I think it was the report that was done with the Brennan Center for Justice, it's clear and simple language. The before and after was great. I'm just going to read it. If an over voted ballot is encountered, the voter is entitled to another blank ballot after surrendering the soiled ballot. That was the before language. The after is: If you make a mistake, ask a poll worker for another ballot.
Whitney:
Thank you. I love that line. Helped write it. And we've continued to work with them. We did better ballots in 2008 and it was a collaboration between Brennan Center for Justice, which is a legal rights center founded by the family of Justice Brennan, Center for Civic Design and some political scientists who do data analysis of elections and had been looking at elections that had anomalous results and trying to understand what had happened often. And they'd come to many of the same conclusions from that perspective that we did from just looking at design.
Whitney:
So we did this first report. We did a second report in 2012. They continued to bring out reports. In fact, we're just starting to set up a project where we'll be looking at primary ballots with them in the hopes that if there are problems that we can see, we can either get them to change the ballot or at least do voter education around it.
Gary:
Right. This actually gets into the burgeoning area of legal design. How do we take legal language, which elections are often coated in legal language, and simplify it for the nonlegal audience? At the one hand, we want to make sure that we cover our legal bases but, as I said, it doesn't have to read like you're buying a house or applying to refi for your mortgage.
Whitney:
Well, buying a house or refi your mortgage shouldn't read like that either.
Gary:
No. Exactly right.
Whitney:
And we've been learning from people like Jenny Reddish who in the UX world, she's the grandmother of plain language, and from the Center for Plain Language in Washington, which is the advocacy arm, Plainlanguage.gov, which is the internal government work. The knowledge is out there. The challenge is to get everybody to believe it. Get everybody's eyes and ears retrained so that a simply worded instruction or simply worded description sounds authoritative.
Gary:
Right. And clear and directional. Not just metaphorically directional. The fact that there's a whole listing on your website about a project to redesign the signs about where to vote.
Whitney:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Gary:
Again, that's one of those things where you would not ... You'd think the entire journey, all those touch points, that's a touch point. Where do I go? Do I go up the stairs or do I go down the stairs? Does it excite me? Does it create this sense ... The American flag is there. That's cool. Is that what we want to make it? Do we want to make it look somewhere else and get a project with the university to redesign where to find to vote.
Whitney:
Yeah. I mean, it's the little stuff. It's all the little things about design that add up to the big experience. So if your vote by mail ballot comes in the mail and you can tell it's a ballot and it doesn't look like junk. The first project we did in California was California has laws that require a huge amount of information to be mailed to voters. We had a nice fancy description of the project, but here's how I put it in colloquial language. The real question was if we're going to mail all this paper to voters, can we make it worth the trees that died for it?
Gary:
That is a good way of putting it. Yeah.
Whitney:
Because giving people information they don't understand might be worse than giving them no information at all, because no information at all, you'll ask your friends, you'll muddle through, you'll do what you do. But when you get information that makes elections sound hard, it makes them off putting and it makes you think, "I'm not smart enough to vote." Or, "I don't know enough to vote." And as we did the testing for that project, which many of our ideas were adopted by counties across California. What we discovered was that everybody we talked to felt under prepared for elections.
Whitney:
And what really brought it home to me was we were at a church on a Sunday afternoon. They had a little fair going on outside. We had a table and one of the people we spoke to was a teacher and he'd give civics lessons. They would actually look at some of the ballot measures and the class would work through the issues of it and they'd think about it and decide and think about how you would decide how you were going to vote. This is pretty intense. I mean, think about the preparation a teacher has a to. He said, "But when I go in to vote, I still don't feel like I'm prepared." That's shocking.
Gary:
And so part of your job then ... I mean, at one point for The Center for Civic Design do you boundary what it is that you do, because there's so much to do? There's technology, there's integrity, there's paper ballots, there's voter education, there's plain language and accessibility, ease of use. Is there the potential, do you think, for a scope creep, where you start to take on too much?
Whitney:
All the time.
Gary:
To what extent is there this, "No, we got to stay in our lane. This is our lane right here"?
Whitney:
There's always scope creep. We stay in our lane not so much because we want to have a lane but because we're five people, five and a half people. So there's only so much we can do. We think about where is our expertise as UXers? Where do we bring something new? So we do a lot of work with states where we're solving a problem. The call we get is often something like, "We want to redesign our voter registration form. Can you work with us?" And we say, "Great. Yeah, sure, we can work with you." And the outcome of that will be in fact a new voter registration form. But what we're doing is teaching them how to redesign a form because they work with us or we work with them, more appropriately.
Whitney:
They do testing with us. They see how it happens. So there's nothing wrong with having a company or an organization or an external company design things. But we want the election officials to have a sense of when it's good. And we want them to be able to do it themselves. I think the highest person we've ever gotten was the state election director of a state actually ran usability sessions with us and says, "I will never do a major project without that." Not just because it's good politics to go out and include voters in your process, but because they tell you things that you can't see because you know too much about elections.
Gary:
Exactly, yeah. No. I think it's a great way of putting it. The more you think you know, the more blinded you are to what there is to learn.
Whitney:
Right. We have focus areas. We are doing a lot of work on the new automatic voter registration work and other voter registration modernizations. We do work on language access because we think this gets at the whole question of new voters and low literacy and languages like Spanish and Arabic access. And we do work on vote by mail because we did this project to design the vote by mail envelopes for California. We are now taking that national. Michigan is adopting them. A couple other states are beginning to adopt them, a bunch of counties are. And the postal service is really excited because they would like to have one standard for the outbound envelop so that they all look the same because that will help their postal carriers.
Gary:
It reminds me of the old days of survey design when we used to do mail surveys. There was all this research that was done on what weight of stock paper would result in a higher response rate or what color of paper or things like that. Of course, we've gotten away from those concerns and survey research because so much is done online. But hee with voting it's what colors ... On your website, it's like what font to use and what font not to use. What size font should you use?
Whitney:
We learned it's actually simpler than you think because the answer is it's not the font, it's have one of any number of fonts that are clean, open, Sans-serif fonts. Open, meaning that the height and width of an O would be about round rather than some sort of angle shape. But a clean Sans-serif. Sans-serif because the serifs are confusing to people who don't read English as their native language and they add noise on the page so they just make the page noisier just by all the books that were printed with serif type. This is a different problem. And the answer to text size is bigger than you think. The sweet spot for text size is between 12 and 14 points. We print things at eight and nine.
Whitney:
Now, there's a lot of stuff that's a 10 and you can get away with 10 points if you've designed it well, if you have good space between the lines and the margins aren't too wide. You can get away with smaller fonts. But finding the balance between something that has so many words in it that you have crammed it onto the page. And so when they can, we try to help them reduce the number of words, put lists into a list. So if you're saying there's four ways to do something, put in a list and you can see one, two, three, four. Actually number them, bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet.
Whitney:
If you think about someone explaining something with hand gestures, right? You say, "Well, there's four things. One, two ..." You explain one and your hand is making little gestures in the air. That's what bullets are. They're the little bumps, the little stops that make you go, "Okay, this is the first one, this is the second one." So the techniques are not hard.
Gary:
That is one of my greatest aggravations is that when I'm reading a paper or reading something and the person says ... This is like an academic paper or any kind of paper. There are four things to keep in mind. First, blah, blah, blah. And then there's no second, third, or fourth. I'm left with where's the ...
Whitney:
Right.
Gary:
No, I got to do the work.
Whitney:
Or semi colon. We were working on a voter registration form and there's a voter's affirmation at the bottom of it. We weren't allowed to change the words. That law was not being changed, just the form. What we discovered was that if we just took that and we took every semi colon and put a bullet after it, so we just broke this long sentence that was really a list of things you were affirming, and we just put each semi colon clause into its own bullet, we actually watched voters testing this form and they would have their pen in their hand ready to sign and they read. Here's your voter oath. And they go, "Yep. I'm that. Yep, yep, yep." And then they'd sign. I felt like it's a magic trick because we now see people signing something that is in fact a legal oath that has criminal penalties and knowing what they're signing.
Gary:
And what I love about that story is your career started out in lighting design where you were trying to direct people's attention using lighting and here you are today trying to direct people's attention using fonts.
Whitney:
You got it. It's a natural progression.
Gary:
And if you could dance at all, if you had any kind of dancing ability, we might not be having this conversation right now.
Whitney:
That's true.
Gary:
So, I mean, the upshot of all of this is we owe your contributions to our democracy to your inability to dance.
Whitney:
Be a klutz, change the world.
Gary:
For people who are listening to this and they want to get involved, support, learn more about The Center for Civic Design, what opportunities are there to support it, get involved, work with, because you're only five people, there's a lot of work to be done. What's their pathway, their journey to becoming part of this larger effort?
Whitney:
Well, our site is TheCenterforCivicDesign.org. We keep what we call a regulars list in an ohmage to Sherlock Holmes. People who would like to do something in elections but not give up their full time job because when we are working in a geographical area, we will often call on people or just let them know about job opportunities or project opportunities in their area, just a way to keep in touch. We, of course, accept donations as a 501C3. But the thing we tell people the most is start here. Go to your local election office and volunteer to be a poll worker. You will learn so much about how elections work and you will get to know the people and maybe you become someone who helps them review the translations of the materials or help run a Get Out The Vote drive. So there are so many opportunities to get involved at a local level. We just said these are under resourced departments and there's one close to everyone.
Gary:
And it matters to all of us because regardless of who you're voting for or what the election is, all politics is local. All elections are local. It matters directly in your lives. This is one of the things I tell my students all the time who often don't vote, is this matters to you today and it matters to you tomorrow and so you should have an awareness of both civically how it works and to make sure that it works for everybody.
Whitney:
Vote for your mayor. Vote for your city counsel. They're the people that make the laws that affect your daily life.
Gary:
And so I think with what, is there anything else that I didn't cover that you think is worth ...
Whitney:
No, gosh ...
Gary:
Important to mention?
Whitney:
No. It's been a great conversation. Go vote. If you're not registered, get registered. If you think you won't be home on election day, sign up for an absentee ballot.
Gary:
Vote early, vote often. No, don't do that.
Whitney:
No, no, no. Vote early.
Gary:
Vote early and vote once. We don't want to have any issues. And I should just mention there as I make that joke that the research has indicated there is a very, very small number of voting irregularities that happens with people with voter fraud. So before anybody gets stuck on that track.
Whitney:
Brennan Center says that you are more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud as an individual voter.
Gary:
Let's hope that neither happens.
Whitney:
Indeed.
Gary:
All right. Thanks, Whitney, so much.
Whitney:
Thank you.
Gary:
A very special thanks to Whitney for a great conversation and civics lesson on how Experience Design is fundamental to voting. Really do appreciate her insights in how things work, how they can be improved, and what you can do to get involved. For those listening in the US especially, it is our democracy together and we each have a role to play in this presidential election season that is underway. Go to CivicDesign.org to find out more about The Center for Civic Design and how you can take part. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have ideas for future episodes or feedback on past ones, go to Feedback@ExperienceXDesign.com to provide us your thoughts. We really appreciate the feedback we've gotten so far. As we try to create our own little participatory podcast space here.
And you can go to ExperienceXDesign.com to subscribe to our feed as well and check out past episodes. Please consider donating through our Glow.FM link to help us fund the podcasts that we're bringing to you. Finally, make sure you register to vote. If you think you are registered to vote, make sure to check your registration that you are registered to vote. Help others register and help your local election board with your design expertise. Finally, remember that democracy is not a spectator sport, but it is a design challenge, so go forth and meet that challenge. Bye.