Top: Book Cover
Bottom: An example of a redesigned ballot

If graphic designer Marcia Lausen had started revamping ballots just a few years earlier, George W. Bush might not be our President.

Lausen, the director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Art and Design, is a principal at the multidisciplinary firm Studio/lab. Her new book, Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design (University of Chicago Press, $65), is a compilation of guidelines for improving the American voting experience through design, based largely on research she conducted here in Chicago with students from UIC. (Full disclosure: I have been an adjunct instructor in UIC’s art history department.)

The Design for Democracy initiative was founded in 1998 by Ric Grefé, the executive director of the AIGA (the professional association for American graphic designers). In November 2000, Lausen and other AIGA members were horrified to learn that Florida’s poorly designed “butterfly ballot” had cost Al Gore the election by inducing thousands of confused voters to select Pat Buchanan by mistake.

Yet the graphic designers also saw this crisis as an opportunity to advocate for their profession. “Graphic design has a problem,” Lausen declares. “When it’s effective, it’s invisible.” Now that the Florida ballot and the phrase ballot design were “on the front page of every newspaper in the country,” she recalls, it was time to “draw attention to the idea that design can build trust in government by making communications clear.” Lausen volunteered to redesign the bewildering Chicago/Cook County judicial retention ballot herself. When she showed her version to Cook County Clerk David Orr and his director of communications Scott Burnham, they greeted it with enthusiasm. This no longer surprises her: “I’ve been very impressed by all the election officials that I’ve met around the country,” she explains. “These are people who are working very hard, doing great work and trying to do the right thing. They’re just not trained designers.”

Charged with improving Chicagoans’ voting experience, Lausen decided to collaborate with the seniors in her course on graphic design professional practice and UIC industrial design students taught by Stephen Melamed. The students examined voting data gathered by Sapient, a global consulting firm; were trained as election judges; and held a mock election to test their ideas. In 2002, Chicago implemented many of their suggestions—as soon as the state passed legislation allowing the use of lowercase letters on the ballot.

After Lausen discussed Design for Democracy with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), UIC students spent the next semester overhauling Oregon’s unusual vote-by-mail system at the request of its elections director, John Lindback. During a third semester, devoted to helping disenfranchised Chicago voters, students created posters and informational materials in multiple languages that were aimed at young adults.

Unfortunately, Design for Democracy did not have the resources to implement the last project effectively outside the classroom, and the initiative encountered other obstacles: Efforts to redesign equipment such as voting booths were largely ignored because their manufacturers have little incentive to update them. But this could change: The AIGA is working with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to develop the best practices for ballot and polling place design that will eventually be incorporated into law. In the meantime, any town, city or state can refer to Design for Democracy for sound advice on how to ensure no chad is left behind.

Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design is available now.