Re: Ballot Papers

Dave Wrenne writes:
> 
> I am a MA Communication Design student at Central St. Martins in
> London and am currently working on my main MA project which deals with
> voting and electorial design with special interest in ballot papers
> and the issues that have arrisen in many democratic elections due to
> poor ballot design. I am currently researching the fundamentals of
> form design as to inform my research on the design of the ballot.
> 
> I am having issues in finding ballot paper examples and was wondering
> if anyone here knew any resources?
> 

A topic dear to my heart.

--UK------------------
In 2008, Effortmark Ltd (that's me, Caroline Jarrett) worked with User
Vision in Scotland on a project for the Electoral Commission where we ran
usability tests on UK ballot papers and other polling materials: 
- Parliamentary (i.e. General election)
- European Parliament
- Local election
- London elections (x3: Mayor, London Assembly individual members and London
Assembly constituency members)
- Scottish Parliament
- Welsh Assembly
- Northern Ireland Assembly

These various elections use the following different voting systems:
.	First past the post used at: UK General elections; the Welsh
Assembly, Scottish Parliamentary and GLA elections for the Constituency
Member vote; local government elections in England and Wales; referendums;
.	Closed list used at: European Parliamentary elections (except in
Northern Ireland); the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliamentary elections
for the Regional Member vote; the Greater London Authority election for the
London-wide Assembly members;
.	Single transferable vote used at: all elections in Northern Ireland
except a UK General election; the Scottish local government elections;
.	Supplementary vote used at: elections for directly elected mayors in
England, including the Mayor of London.

We also tested a selection of different postal voting materials.

Our report is available at:
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/document-summary?assetid=77687

It contains extracts from ballot papers including the mistakes that
participants made when trying to vote with them.

The Electoral Commission used this evidence, and other work, to inform its
new guidelines on electoral materials. These are published at:
http://www.dopolitics.org.uk/making-your-mark

The Electoral Commission people that we worked with were great and very
approachable. Their names are listed on the page that describes our report.
If you do contact them, please bear in mind that they are extremely busy at
the moment because of the General Election that must happen this year.

Louise Ferguson has worked on improving the voting experience in the UK for
ages, and is particularly interested in evoting. Her resources are here:
http://louiseferguson.com/evoting/


--USA--------------
In the US, the Brennan Center for Justice published its report "Better
Ballots". (I had the honour of being one of task force members). The report
is available here:
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/better_ballots/
and the page also has links to other problematic ballots. The report shows
many examples of voting problems and ballot designs.

Whitney Quesenbery was one of the authors of the Brennan Center report. She
is the founder and a key member of the Usability Professionals' Association
Voting and Usability project, more details here:
http://www.upassoc.org/civiclife/voting/

They maintain a blog on this topic:
http://ballotusability.blogspot.com/

and indeed recently posted an example of a problematic ballot paper. Their
email address is:
[email protected]

You might ask them to post a call for examples for you. 

Whitney was also a member of the Election Assistance Committee. You can read
more about her work on voting (with examples) here:
http://www.wqusability.com/articles/voting-intro.html

The AIGA also has a group called 'Design for Democracy'. Their web site is
here:
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/election-project


--Mexico---------------
In 2007, the Information Design Association conference in Greenwich had a
very interesting talk about voting problems in Mexico. Unfortunately, the
conference web site doesn't seem to be working any more. 


--Netherlands---------
Thanks, Karel - another set of examples for my list!

--Actual examples-----
As you will see, there are quite a few examples in the materials above. I've
also got a few original ballot papers tucked away somewhere (if I can find
them) - contact me offlist and I'll see what I can do about digging them up
and lending them to you.

Best
Caroline Jarrett
[email protected]
www.formsthatwork.com
Author: "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability"




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