PISTIL Magazine
Spring, 2005

Vote of Confidence
Every vote counts — at least in Chicago — thanks to Marcia Lausen, who spearheaded the redesign of the butterfly ballot

Marcia Lausen often finds herself on the defensive about ballot design, fielding questions from those skeptics who embody the typical layman's view of design. At a recent conference, she was asked, “What are you going to do? Put flowers on the ballots?”

Lausen, director of art and design at University of Illinois at Chicago and founding principal at the city’s Studio/lab, is working to clarify the often confusing election process with Design for Democracy’s Election Design Initiative, where she serves as graphic design director.

Graphic design comes in as broad a range of forms as the content that it conveys. The idea is to communicate the needed message effectively and appropriately, but most designers will agree that regardless of the message, design — the messenger — strives to be as invisible as possible. “Content is king.”

The effort to include designers in the election process runs into occasional problems from a lack of understanding of what graphic design is. “When I was trying to work on getting this ballot design implemented,” Lausen said, “I was constantly complimented on how beautiful it was but [told] it wasn’t going to work. I kept having to say, ‘It’s not about beauty; it’s about usability.’ When I speak in conferences, sometimes the titles of the sessions are [like] Creativity in Ballot Design, so I have to begin by saying it’s not about creativity: it’s about legibility and problem solving.”

Election design, including ballot design, is one area where invisibility isn’t simply a stylistic choice but a necessity. As the 2000 election and Florida’s much-derided butterfly ballot brought to worldwide attention, poor ballot design can not only be frustrating to the voter, but it can also undermine the democratic process by inadequately conveying which hole to punch or simply cluttering the page with so many extraneous words that the voters’ eyes glaze over and they skip the section entirely.

After the Florida ballot fiasco, the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts took a cue from Paula Scher’s criticism of the Florida ballot in The New York Times and formed the Voting Experience Redesign Initiative to address the problems of Chicago’s own butterfly ballot. This initiative was later spun off into its own national nonprofit organization as Design for Democracy, broadening its initial goal of redesigning the Chicago ballot to include bigger advocacy issues.

Rather than simply critiquing the Chicago butterfly ballot, though, Lausen volunteered her team to submit a redesign, which served as the basis for the ballot Cook County voters saw this past November. And, although she has been (wrongly) credited with sole authorship of the redesign, Lausen is quick to set the record straight.

“We advised on the redesign,” she said. “But the results of this have been very successful despite the fact that there are all these sort of weird things that don’t make sense.”

For example, the judicial section of the Chicago butterfly was a mess of arrows and names. A UIC Ph.D. student, inspired by a March 2004 piece in the Chicago Tribune on the redesign, charted a whopping 20-percent improvement in voter participation with the redesigned ballot.

“That’s almost unheard of in graphic design,” Lausen added proudly, “to have that kind of proof.” Even with such proof, Lausen still runs into resistance with election officials who still think design is all flowers and frills. However, that is slowly changing.

“We have a lot of education to do as a profession,” Lausen explained. “And this is the reason that I got so involved in this. Now that I’ve spoken several times at a lot of gatherings of election officials, I’m starting to hear my language back again, which is great.”