Episode 1: Whitney Quesenbery on Election Ballot Design

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Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to Surfacing. In this episode, hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale talk to Whitney Quesenbery about elections, the importance of ballot design, the role of election officials and how she and others at the Center for Civic Design are working to improve the experience of voting.

Lisa Welchman:

Whitney, thank you so much, really, really, really appreciate you being here. It has been a while since I've seen you. I think the last time that I saw you, we were riding bikes from the Choptank into Cambridge.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Didn't I see you someplace else after that, where you were snowed in or stranded somehow in an airport?

Lisa Welchman:

That sounds like my life in general, except for the last year. So let's say yes to that, anyhow we're really glad that you're here with us and we've got a few questions for you in particular around voting, which we think that you can answer. So I'm going to slide it over to Andy and let him start out since you all have actually never met.

Andy Vitale:

So I guess we'll skip more formalities for now and we can always connect offline and we definitely appreciate you being here. So the question that I definitely want to ask is why civic design?

Whitney Quesenbery:

Why civic design compared to any other kind of design or why call it civic design?

Andy Vitale:

Just why civic design over any other design? Was this based on a personal experience or what really drove you towards civic design?

Whitney Quesenbery:

Yeah, this is really interesting. In 2000, I also got elected to something and what I got elected to was what was then Usability Professionals Association. And they said, "You're going to be in charge of outreach, go do something about elections." And I thought, "Well, I'm a little user researcher. That's about all I am, but I know how to go do a little research and I know how to listen." And I started going to events about it and I started going to conferences and I started talking about it. And the next thing I knew, I was appointed to a federal advisory committee and I thought, "Great, we're going to write standards. I know all about writing standards and we're going to spend nine months at it. And then I'm going to go back to the rest of my life." And that was in 2002 and three.

Whitney Quesenbery:

So, and I just never seem to quite escape it. Every once in a while [inaudible 00:02:52] and I, and other people working in the field would say, "Should we be an organization? Nah, it's too much work" And then one day someone we knew was working on a really, truly amazing project called Future of California Elections. And they were looking for someone to do some research into how voters get information. And we said, "Great. We know how to do that." And they said, "Yeah, you're in 501(c)(3). Right?" And we went, "Sure, absolutely." And six weeks later we were 501(c)(3).

Whitney Quesenbery:

So I guess the other half of the question is, is what's really compelling about it. And maybe that's a more interesting story than that silly origin story, but-

Lisa Welchman:

Well, yeah, I mean, for me, there seems to be just from reading some of your stuff online and the piece that you did in the New York Times, there's a personal passion to it as well, and a stickiness to it. I mean, because there's a lot of different things that one can design and you're really sort of moving yourself into a niche in an area that has a lot of juice to it.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And it's about the nerdiest thing I've ever done. I mean, in so many ways, I mean, in some ways it's like the most expansive and the most aspirational, which is that we could solve democracy by improving the design of democracy. And on the other hand, it's a lot of forums and digging through election code and working with election officials. No, I think we did kind of get sucked in slowly because we thought, "Well, we know how to do this." And then we discovered that people didn't know how to do that. And that we brought something in a way of thinking about how people interact with government that didn't really exist in elections. This was a little up ahead of the curve on the civic tech movement. But we weren't designing big system, but weren't designing healthcare.gov and the unemployment system for the country or anything like that.

Whitney Quesenbery:

We were designing these kind of micro interactions with government that turned into this moment when you can metaphorically or physically walk into a polling place and have your voice heard whether anybody wants to hear it or not. And so we began this from voters, right? We were UXers? We began this from voters. We very quickly realized that while understanding voters is the key to everything, just like understanding anything is the key to everything. That the stuff all came from somewhere and the place where the experience of elections come from is election offices. And so we started getting to know those people who are actually kind of hard to know. They're a little they're in their world, they do their thing. When people come in and tell them what to do, everybody comes in and tells them what to do. So they're like, "Yeah. Okay, fine." But we just came in and said, "Well, so tell us what you do, tell us what the challenges are here." And that was a little unique.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because this past election in the US that was just fraught full of all kinds of drama and high pitched, I mean, you couldn't script it any better. But a lot of these individuals who we would never even consider exist, who are part of the process-

Whitney Quesenbery:

Are heroes.

Lisa Welchman:

... Were all of a sudden, either are heroes or evil demons, depending on who you think you were, or we just didn't even understand the process. And one of the things that I saw on the website for your organization was talking about this how sometimes policy is arcane and very, very difficult to deal with. And so one of the things that popped in my mind, because I'm all about policy and standards working in the governance space is, how do you tackle that problem from a design perspective? How do you deal with the fact that you sometimes will have legislation and processes in place that are just have to be that way? But you're trying to aim towards this moment when I go cast my vote and there's just all of this distance. And I don't think people probably have a really big appreciation for how you traverse that distance, how you get from this weird legislation to this clear moment where it's rarely easy to cast a vote.

Whitney Quesenbery:

So let me take about one minute and do our kind of theory of action. Which is we started with voters. We started wanting to make the voting experience better. We then realized that you can't just fix that by talking to voters. I mean, obviously all the people who do work in civics education and motivating voters and doing turnout, they're doing God's work because if people don't show up at the polls, it doesn't matter. But so we started working with election offices trying to make that experience better by saying, "Well, you don't have to make the form so awful. We can make the form easier to use that would help you to all the things that we know about usability and user experience of helping everybody." Thinking this is a kind of gigantic service design. But what we very quickly came to realize was how much constraint they have. Things that tell them how to write things in ways that are not maybe the easiest to read. Lots of micro requirements, some very big requirements that hem them in.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And they don't have a lot of money. I mean, you might say, "Well, Los Angeles, that's a huge department." But it's also a huge district, right? So per person, they probably don't have much more money than a small district. And so we began thinking about having opinions about how policy might change. In New York, we worked with I mean, in a small way, with a bunch of a coalition of activists who were trying to get some things changed in the New York State election code. They were tiny, tiny things that were really the result of trying to and switching from those lever machines they had to paper.

Lisa Welchman:

What year was this?

Whitney Quesenbery:

2010, we started working on this.

Lisa Welchman:

They still had lever machines.

Whitney Quesenbery:

2010 was when they switched over.

Lisa Welchman:

Wow.

Andy Vitale:

Wow.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And the laws said things like, I mean, there was actually instructions on the back of the ballot that were written for the lever machines that didn't match the paper. They were actually wrong. If you follow the instructions, you would vote incorrectly. It just happened to be on the back of the ballot in 6 point type. So probably no one ever saw it. And it took three, four sessions, that's eight years to get that changed. Because when you open up the election code, everybody's afraid of doing that because they're afraid of what Pandora's box might open. And so that's one side. Sometimes it's very, very slow.

Whitney Quesenbery:

We also saw things like people would pass a great idea like automatic voter registration. And they would put in the law that this is a law that says, when you go to the motor vehicle department, instead of them asking you if you'd like to be registered, they give you a chance to say, you don't want to be registered, but they register you automatically, nothing forces you to go to vote, but they update your registration. It keeps the voter rolls clean. It does all sorts of good things.

Whitney Quesenbery:

The laws said things like a customer of the motor vehicles department shall be given an opportunity to register to vote or shall be registered to vote, unless they affirmatively decline. How do you write a form that has an affirmative declaration that's not a yes, no question? And so we started saying, "If you'd let us help you design the form before you pass the law, then you'd all know what you were looking at." And let's bring some of that design into the standards making process.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And so I think the real answer to your question, which was, how do you actually use design to influence policy is, slowly and carefully. And we have worked with people helping implement policies we disagree with because that's the law and somebody has to implement that. And we think that we'll do it better. Well things like the law might have words in quotes and that means it must be used exactly. But nothing says you can't put some words around those words. Nothing says you have to put them as the biggest text on the page. Nothing says that it has to be the first thing you read. So we can begin to think about what the gap is between what a voter understands and what we're asking them to do. And that we finally, this year actually got a definition of civic design, which is that it works to bridge the gap between civic literacy and what voters need to know to participate.

Andy Vitale:

Just thinking about how design has evolved over the years and how it used to be, it's a screen. Well, it started out like it's a webpage, right? And then it becomes a screen. And thinking beyond that and being ahead of the curve on like this push that we see designers really trying to make an impact and design for good and how design influences things way beyond what we touch every day. And then you say it also, it influences policy slowly. So designers that I know who listen are like talk about speed, speed of the game. We need impact. We need impact fast. And it doesn't jive with like, you can't have fast impact and make a big change.

Andy Vitale:

I mean, occasionally there's that one in a million chance, and that happens. But being at the forefront of this to some extent, I mean, you're talking many years ago. How do you see the industry has changed? And do you feel like you were ahead of the curve or do you feel like now it's just like, I don't know, I don't even know how to phrase it, but ultimately how has the design industry changed to go on par with what you're doing?

Whitney Quesenbery:

I don't really know how the design industry has changed in some ways, but what I do know is that elections have changed. I think when I started the general attitude was, "We're holding an election, show up. Here's what it is. Election is going to be on the fourth, see you there." And in that time election officials in the time since 2000, election officials have come to understand that their job is to invite people to vote, to make sure... I mean, the slogan of the year was nobody should have to choose between their voice and their vote. And so all kinds of people in all kinds of administrations, all kinds of states made decisions about how to run an election in the middle of this pandemic to say, "We can't force a poll worker to decide between helping with an election and risking their health. We can't force a voter into that."

Whitney Quesenbery:

And they did it from a really deeply human perspective. The fact that saying everybody should be able to vote and everybody should be invited to vote. It can be a political statement and can place you in someplace in the political spectrum, is actually kind of hard to navigate sometimes. But why I've gone into meetings where someone has said, "Don't talk about everybody voting, just talk about how this is going to make things work better." And so we go in sometimes and we say, "We're nonprofit, we're non-partisan. And we're actually policy neutral to the extent that we'll work with you to implement the policies that you have." Sometimes in the middle of doing that, they say, "God, this would be so much easier if..." And you see a seed get planted.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And sometimes it does move fast because sometimes it's like the water builds up behind the dam and suddenly it crashes through. New York, a very slow state. This year, one of the things we did, we've been working on vote by mail envelopes and packages and materials for a long time. And we were asked by a funder how we could speed that process up. And we said, well, we usually wait for people to come to us, but what if we proactively designed picked 20 states and just proactively designed their envelopes and then went to them and said, "Look, we have an envelope for you." Now, it was very late. We knew that our chance of getting very many states to say yes to that was pretty low because just time. But we had states say, "Oh, I want to do this so badly. Can we work with you next year?"

Whitney Quesenbery:

And we did [inaudible 00:15:05] New York, we did New York and I sent it off to them and I heard nothing. And I wasn't surprised. And then out of the blue, I got a call that said, "You did these envelopes. We'd like to work with you." And so we started working in a state that has never had very strong state standards. It's very bottom-up county driven. And in New York State, you might have one language. You might have two languages, three languages or five languages if you're in Queens, on your envelope. And not a lot of cohesion, not a lot of history of working together to solve problems. But we started working with a great guy and we started working on the envelope and things went in and went out. We looked at it and we actually, there are two directors of state election office, one Republican, one Democrat, it's that politicized.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And all of a sudden we're talking to both of them and they're saying, "Yeah, let's do this." And the next thing that happened, and this was in like six weeks before the election, I mean, it was really close to the election. And the next thing that happened was that Governor Cuomo put out an executive order to solidify, to formalize some of the changes that were being made. And instead of saying you're going to be vote by mail, make a good envelope. They said there will be a consistent statewide envelope. And that everybody in the state will use the same envelope. And in a tearing rush, we started working on it. There are two vendors in the state who do the most of the counties envelopes. New York City has its own incredible set of requirements because it's such a big city. And because they have five languages and three languages.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And so some of our design went and been for the year. I mean, we have a color stripe envelope. We love it, though with reasons it went away. But for the first time, in a period of eight weeks, we ended up with a consistent statewide envelope in New York State, which is a cool design story. But let me tell you the cool impact story. It reduced the number of ballots that came in and had to be rejected because something was wrong with them on a one to six scale.

Lisa Welchman:

wow.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And we saw that same scale in Michigan when they adopted our statewide envelope and our envelope. And our envelope is it doesn't look like much. It really doesn't look like anything that fancy. And we stole almost every idea on it from some election [inaudible 00:17:26] that was already doing it well. And so we put all the best stuff together. But something happens when there's a statewide envelope or statewide anything, which is that all of a sudden you can do statewide voter education. All of a sudden local community groups can borrow things from the next County. County election officials can work together and trade things and they can share materials around. And so we started building this thing, we call it a little toolkit of all the stuff that we'd had collected and all the stuff that we saw that somebody else had done that was good. And we started putting it in one place and we put out the InDesign files when InDesign was an appropriate medium.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And people started using them. So someone said, "Oh, the district of Columbia, those are great envelopes. Did you do them?" We're like, "Nope, we didn't do them." But they look like ours.

Lisa Welchman:

That's so interesting because there was a question I wanted to ask you. So I'll just stick it in here, which is around decentralization and the impact of that. I mean, we're very US centered and I want to ask you some more about a more global perspective, but for a huge nation, it's all decentralized. And what impact does that have? And I think you've already addressed that to a certain extent and to in your, I guess in your opinion what would a US envelope design look like? Is that something that we even want, or are the policies and legislation so different from state to state and the needs of the citizens so different from state to state, based on those things that you were talking about, languages and cultural things that that's never going to happen because of the size of the nation? What do you think?

Whitney Quesenbery:

I have gone back and forth on this. I started with no, we don't actually want a consistent ballot because what if we pick the one from Palm Beach County in 2000? If we pick a bad one, then it affects the whole country. And so we started thinking about how do you have something that's flexible enough that's consistent enough to be recognizable as consistent and flexible enough to adjust to local conditions? That just might be our printer uses something different and it needs something or it might be we're a small county and so we print a year's worth of ballots at once to get enough quantity of scale. And so we can't customize every single one of them. But how do I get something where if you held it up at arms' length, the voter would say, "Oh yeah, that's a ballot envelope."

Whitney Quesenbery:

And finding those moments. I think the rural urban divide. It's not really about rural versus urban. It's about densely populated versus not densely populated. How do you say, well, you ought to have enough drop boxes for everybody and quantify that in a way that you can write it into law. This is standards of governance, right? Without penalizing one side or the other. So we heard a story in California about a county that said, "Yeah, but the way they're written now, I end up with a drop box out at the corner of route, whatever it was. And someone has to go there every day, even though there was never a ballot in it." This is bad. We don't need that. And on the other hand, you get things like where they say, "Well, in Texas, we only need one drop box per county. And so Harris County has the same number as, name some small county."

Whitney Quesenbery:

And so neither of those is right. So there needs to be some way to begin to think about and quantify what it is people need. Sometimes it's we need something in every ward because the city is very... Those wards actually match geography. Baltimore's a good example of that. And sometimes it's really not neighborhood. I mean, Manhattan has neighborhoods, but they don't really affect your ability to go three more blocks.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. Well Manhattan's up and up has a whole range of people stacked on top of each other, in that very unique way. And any given block could be-

Whitney Quesenbery:

One building can be a polling [crosstalk 00:21:26].

Lisa Welchman:

Right.

Whitney Quesenbery:

So the geographies make a difference. The culture makes a difference. The transportation opportunities make a difference. And there's cultural differences. We know that there for many groups of people, the ability to appear in public in the public square, held in their ballot and putting it in whatever, putting it in the box means is really important. People just end there, all the people who have been historically marginalized. And so the question is now, how do you create something that allows for safe vote by mail, maintaining that? So Baltimore Votes did something called Party at the Polls. They actually did it in four more cities. It's really effective. They send people a box, a little party box. It's got some stuff about voting. It's got some local treats given out. It turns out I just heard something about their research on that, that if a low propensity voter is in a household with a high propensity voter or know someone who got that box and got to see it, it increases turnout because it's personal.

Whitney Quesenbery:

All the things that HBCU is where they do March to the polls, with the marching bands, all of those things are really like, okay, pandemic changed things. And it forced us into being creative. How do we keep the good stuff, re-invent it in a new way? And that is ultimately design. How do we make use of all the new tools that technology has given us and not lose our humanity and not lose our community? As Vermont and Massachusetts go into there, they have very small jurisdictions and they have town meetings and they do voting for town officers is done live and in person.

Whitney Quesenbery:

What happens to Vermont when you say not such a great idea to crowd a bunch of people into a town hall these days, we're going to vote by mail. Do we lose something critical? Do we get more turnout? Maybe more people actually vote in the town elections. Maybe what we need is a way to foster discussion about the decisions that are going to be made ahead of the election. Not so much about crowding the town into the town hall. All right. So we're not the only ones thinking about that stuff, but we try to think about it in terms of design, in terms of how one creates the materials that people interact with.

Andy Vitale:

I lived in Minnesota for a short period of time. And I think of how primaries versus caucuses are very different animals. And just how you approach something that has a different format from one another and try to standardize that to some extent, what goes into that process?

Whitney Quesenbery:

Well, so for example, we've been working on ranked-choice voting, and I have to say that I got into it not convinced. And I've begun to become convinced in part because I watch how the participants we've worked with have reacted to it. But in four states this year, the democratic primaries were run with ranked-choice voting-

Lisa Welchman:

I don't know what ranked-choice choice voting is. What is that?

Whitney Quesenbery:

Ranked-choice voting, we all know-

Lisa Welchman:

Maybe I know what it is but I don't know that it's called that, so.

Whitney Quesenbery:

You may not. So normally you have a ballot and there's X number of people running for an office and you get to choose one of them. And the one that gets the most votes wins or whatever. But in some states the rule is you have to have 50% plus one vote.

Lisa Welchman:

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Whitney Quesenbery:

So if there are five people running, how do you get enough votes? So ranked-choice voting does something very interesting, which is, it says, instead of picking someone, rank the candidates, sometimes it's up to five candidates, but rank the candidates in order of your preference. And so let's say you really love Mr. five, right? But Mr. Five comes in last in the first count. So they take all the ballots for Mr. five and now they count them for their second choice and so on. And the folks who do this, this organization called FairVote is the main promoters of this. Make a lot of claims about improving democracy, because now you have candidates who know that they're going to win in part because supporters of other candidates are going to end up having made them their second or third choice. Well, I had a young friend who moved to Maine where they vote with ranked-choice voting. And he called me up to make sure he understood how it works.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And he said, "You're telling me I can actually vote for who I want now? The first time I can vote for the person I want to, and then vote for the person you're going to tell me to vote for?" Right. And so it lets you have a non-centrist position and a centrist position simultaneously, essentially.

Lisa Welchman:

Complexity.

Whitney Quesenbery:

It is. And it sounds really complex, but it turns out that people just do it. They just mark their ballots.

Lisa Welchman:

No, I think it's honoring complexity, right? It's honoring the fact that it's not either, or it's, there's a system of people out there and some of them you would put higher up and some of them you would... I think that's how we think about folks that we interact with.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And we think about rounds of voting people drop out of the primary and it slowly gets to be fewer and fewer people. And then there's a final vote at the convention. So that's in effect a kind of ranked-choice voting that's happening because all the people who voted for the person who dropped out early are now going to back someone else.

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah. That makes sense. I don't think I've ever lived in a state that had ranked-choice voting. So I've somehow missed that. Have you Andy?

Whitney Quesenbery:

No, probably not.

Andy Vitale:

No.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Maine, has it statewide. Most places it's cities. So Minnesota, in Minneapolis, St. Paul, East St. Louis, East Point, Michigan. It's sometimes been a remedy, a Voting Rights Act remedy for a place in which the way the district thing or the way people were elected was set up, tended to Maine that there was a community there that could never, ever win an election. And it was designed to help solve that problem.

Andy Vitale:

So I did live in Minnesota, but for the caucus that we had, I never went to it. It just felt odd to me to go to a room and have people in different sections of the room kind of persuade you to vote in a certain way. So I just waited until the general elections to vote there.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Right. I mean, caucuses are funny. I mean, I think almost everything we do in elections is funny if you haven't lived in it. I mean, I remember watching parliament on television and when they would stand up and divide. And it took me a while to figure, and then they don't stand up, start wandering around. I literally had to write their friends and say, "What is actually happening here?"

Lisa Welchman:

"What's going on?" I mean, that brings up the big question I had, which is just looking at different trends and different ways of doing things. We've been talking a lot about the US selection, which totally make sense for us. We've been here. And I think even from a global perspective, it's been an outrageous cycle. And a very unique election cycle. I think hands down, anybody would say that, and the world was definitely watching us, but in your opinion, or just from your perspective, who do you think is doing a fabulous job? I'm curious about things. My main reason for wanting to talk to you, honestly, Whitney is silly reason for some, which is why aren't we voting online? I mean, we all work in technology spaces and we want to vote online.

Lisa Welchman:

There's a little kind of like, maybe that's not going to work because we see the disasters that can happen online, but then there's some efficiencies. And you talk about these problems of the piece you did in the New York Times talking about sign this envelope, stuff this in here, X this, don't forget to lick it, but you don't have to put stamps on it. But there's all of this process and I'm thinking well, online that wouldn't really solve the problem. So what are some different ways of doing this and I guess the pros and cons of those? It's a really broad question.

Whitney Quesenbery:

[crosstalk 00:29:14].

Lisa Welchman:

I know, but-

Whitney Quesenbery:

Let me take the online question head-on [crosstalk 00:29:18].

Lisa Welchman:

Okay. That's good.

Whitney Quesenbery:

We will vote online one day. It just won't be this internet.

Lisa Welchman:

Ooh. What has to change?

Whitney Quesenbery:

Well, for one thing, we need a level of security that we simply don't have. I mean, everybody says, "Well, I can bank online. Why can't I vote online?" But in the banking transaction, you get to see the transaction and the bank gets to see the transaction and you can see it together. And by the way, banks eat a lot of money in fraud.

Lisa Welchman:

They've got that, that's on their budget sheet. They know that that's going to be.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Yeah. I mean, there's in-person fraud. I mean, the comparison of in-person voter fraud and online voting have nothing to do with each other. The chance of in-person voting fraud is so rare you're more likely to be hit by lightning. So all of this stuff about voter ID, because someone might impersonate a voter is just-

Lisa Welchman:

Doesn't happen.

Whitney Quesenbery:

... Say a rude word. The question of how do we make sure that the ballots we send out to the balance that are coming back? Now, that's actually a question worth asking because and in Oregon where they started all of this, in Washington where they started doing it pretty early. They've kind of switched the equation instead of worrying about how many ballots you're sending out. You're thinking about managing very carefully the ballots that come back. It's the difference between an IRS form and the theater ticket.

Lisa Welchman:

I see.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Right. Who cares, how many IRS firms went out there. Right. But some come back. And I think the other thing that's really important in elections, is that elections are now extremely technological. After 2000, the Help America Vote Act of 2002, put a lot of money into elections. And one of the things they did was say, you've got to have a good statewide voter registration system, that makes things like vote centers possible. A vote center isn't just a big polling place. It is specifically a system in which a voter in a district say, Los Angeles can go to any voting location in that County and be able to vote. So now you can vote near where you work. You can get up, you can commute to work and there'll be a voting center somewhere near there. Or you can be staying with your mother, because she's not feeling well. And you can vote near where she is. Right.

Whitney Quesenbery:

So getting to open that up and you can't really do good vote by mail unless you have a good clean database. For one thing, it'll bankrupt you because every time you mail a ballot to the wrong place and you have to mail another one, that's another three bucks of paper and postage.

Lisa Welchman:

So you're talking about using the technology to support everything all the way up to the event. And then the event is happening real time, but we can use that stack with all of that technology to make that way, way more efficient, and then hopefully have fabulous ballot design. And it's a great experience for everybody.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Right. So for example, when they mail you your ballot, there's probably somewhere on those, a barcode of some kind. And that's because no one's typing your name in to look you up to say your ballot arrived, they're scanning it. It means that they can track that. They can tell how many there are, it's a little harder to try to fake a ballot. And it would be quite difficult. And then you get into the question of how the heck is someone who has a disability that means they can't handle or read paper. How are they supposed to vote by mail? And there's an answer to this now. And it is existed for a number of years. It's been going on in Oregon, which is always ahead of the curve for 10 or 15 years now. Well, it couldn't have been 15 years, 10 years anyway.

Whitney Quesenbery:

What they do is they call it an alternative ballot. Without getting to specifics, you have a way of telling them that you want to vote electronically. You access the ballot, in the early days they actually send you a CD, a disk, right? They mailed a disk to people. You use that to vote. You print out your ballot, you put your ballot in the envelope and you mail it back. So it still has some challenges, but it has given you the opportunity to vote with an electronic user interface. And I'm really in favor of that, because that digital interface means that you can make the text big and small. It means you can adjust things to your physical needs, but it also means that it can prevent you from over voting. It can give you a review screen, right?

Whitney Quesenbery:

When you mark a paper ballot, you're going, you're sort of giving them an order, but you don't know how they reading it. If you're in a restaurant, you say, I want this and this and this, and the guy reads it back to you to make sure it's right. That connection is lost. With an electronic interface, I go through, I mark the people I want to vote for, and it shows me a review screen. And it says, "You're about to vote for these people, is this right?" And I go, "Yep." And I print it out. And now it says, "Check this piece of paper again." And so I've got three places where I can check that the voting system is hearing what I'm saying, makes it an actual conversation. And we did a project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology on sort of what you need to have a remote marking system work.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And some of it, it turned out, we thought we were going to have real conflicts between the needs of accessibility and the needs of security, but it turned out that they mesh. We wanted not to have to identify yourself personally, but to be able to say, "I live at 78 Washington Avenue and you haven't sent me the right ballot for that." We wanted it not to be sending your voting choices over the internet to make up the ballot. We would like to see a ballot that can be counted directly. Often the ballots come in and because people have printed them on who knows what, they have to be recopied to make it right, but I'd be nice if we didn't have to do that. And so this year there was of course, a lot of interest in this and some lawsuits about it. And so a lot of states had an online ballot delivery system for the first time.

Whitney Quesenbery:

They're not used by a huge number of people. Then part, because if you have disability, you have a way of interacting with the world. And so it takes a while for those things to get into the popular life. But it was probably a good thing because election officials had a lot to deal with and they got to try out the system and get the mechanics of it working right. And now they can slowly begin to ramp it up. One state said they used in the primary and they had like five people use it. And they used it again in the general, and they had 500 people use it. So you start to see those numbers going up as people learn to trust it and as the election officials learn to use it.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And can I just do a little public service announcement here, which is that one of the jokes in the election world was that one day they would have an election that was run absolutely beautiful and no one would notice. And that's really what happened this year. This was one of the best administered elections I've ever seen people in the face of every problem that you could have thrown at you including hurricanes, two in a row in Louisiana, managed to pull off an election. And I think it happened for a couple of reasons. One was that there were some problems in the primaries and everybody that was a real wake up call. And the other was that I think this was like the test of their career. The election director of Georgia says that he went into this election, thinking that his job was to introduce a new voting system. And he figured that was going to be one of the hardest things he would do.

Whitney Quesenbery:

If he had known that this was the only, the fifth hardest thing, not sure he would have stuck around. So it was so hard that everybody rose to the challenge. And there are so many stories of election officials doing things that just make them heroes.

Lisa Welchman:

And usually, unsung heroes, and invisible heroes, people who we just think of as either sort of these leaning in the policy wonk directions, pushing around things and not... Just counting.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Yeah. Did you notice, did you watch any of the videos from Philadelphia as they were counting and all the controversy in the news clips?

Lisa Welchman:

Yeah.

Whitney Quesenbery:

If you looked at the room in the convention center hanging from the ceiling were these banners, I don't know if they were cardboard or cloth, but hanging from the ceiling where things that identified the work that was happening immediately underneath them. And that went up, not for the people who are doing the work, but so people observing could tell what was happening. So it's a service design that now incorporates the need for public scrutiny as well, for observers as well. And in the face of that, to have people say, they don't know what's happening.

Lisa Welchman:

Must've been infuriating for you because you, because you knew what was going on. Right. For most of us we're watching these clips on television and it almost just looks like chaos. And there's an occasional person standing with their hand behind their back looking stern. And we're like, "Oh, that must be an election official or somebody who's observing." But we don't have any sense of what's happening, but it's really great to hear you talk about it in that way.

Whitney Quesenbery:

I think it was frustrating for me. I think it was infuriating for the people doing the work, that they were doing such an amazing job at it and were nonetheless being attacked in such false ways.

Andy Vitale:

Just thinking about how this started and how you identified a problem space. It's like anybody uncovering a unchartered territory, right? How hard is it to go to these election officials and say, "Hey, I've identified this problem and I want to help solve this." How open are they to that feedback? And are they like, "Hey, no worry. We've got this. Don't worry about it."

Whitney Quesenbery:

It was hard. It took time. It took a lot of conscious work to do it. It wasn't any harder than getting an oncologist to trust me when I was working at National Cancer Institute. Okay. I said, I don't really know what's going on in the UX world, but I kind of do. I think two things that we did, one was that we evolved our practice to meet the situation. So we do a lot more, very low intensity, not quantitative work. We do a lot of our recruiting is by... So it used to be by intercepts. We would simply go to a community, find a place, rent a space and sit on the library steps to try to meet people who weren't going to show up at 2:00 PM at a market research facility.

Whitney Quesenbery:

We also don't publish negative reports. So, because everything is public because it's all FOIAble. So it can only be asked for under the Freedom of Information Act. We damn with faint praise when we want to damn. We might do something like, one of the first things we did with some, they weren't really usability test, but user interviews with people where we had samples of different voter guide pages to see which ones resonated with people just to begin to kind of understand the world at all. And we counted up how many people liked which of them. And we've published the top in a presentation to the state we were working with. We published the top five pages. And one of the things that was fascinating about them was how different they looked because they actually, the look of the page reflected the content.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And the other that I loved was someone who had a very good voter guide in that state came up to me and said, "Not one of our pages made it in there. What did we do wrong?" And I said, "Nothing actually, it just we didn't happen to test with your pages. We just haven't..." But we never said, "Oh my God, this one is terrible." Because that reflects on someone who is in the public eye. And so we started saying, "How can we help you?" We never tell someone they haven't gone far enough. We say, "Oh, you'd like us to rewrite or redesign this thing. Well, here's a really extreme redesign and here's a little less, and here's an even little less." And sometimes they say, "Go for it." And sometimes they say, "Oh, no, we're going to take a baby step." And that's fine because there's another election.

Whitney Quesenbery:

We were piloting the voter guides in three counties in California. And one of them was a pretty large district. And so they had a big staff and a good staff, a staff that did actually pretty good voter outreach. And they were like, "We like our cover. We don't want to change our thing." And so that whole consistency battle that happens when you do a new standard. And the director of elections that I can tell them to do it. I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that." And we did some work with them. We helped them out wherever they needed help. They actually helped us with a bunch of testing in languages because they had a language staff and we left them alone. And after the election, we were doing a webinar with the three pilot counties and myself and for the whole state election community.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And I got to see what they'd done for the first time. And they had done everything. They had done the things they told us they could never do. And I watched this presentation and I went last and I said, "I just have to ask a question. We had this conversation about how much money it would cost you to put one more page to that voter guide and all of those technical constraints, what happened?" And he said, "Once we got started, we just couldn't stop." So we met them where they were. We try not to talk down to them. We try to take seriously how hard what they do is. I could not actually do their job. I don't think. I have other skills, but I don't think I could actually do that job.

Whitney Quesenbery:

And taking that seriously and sticking around. I mean, half of it is just sticking around for long enough that they begin to trust you and they begin, we'll talk to one state about something and they'll say, "Oh yeah, we talked to that other state. And they said you were great to work with." Right. So that word of mouth, it's a small community.

Lisa Welchman:

Well, that sounds fantastic. And I think you're totally underestimating your own personal impact in this process. You may not have been in the middle of that change, but sounds like you all initiate a lot of change. And so that's really fantastic and doing it in a fairly ego-free way where it's not, "I have to make my point." I think people work really well in that type of environment. So as a citizen, thank you.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Well, thanks. But I mean, I think this would serve people in UX a lot better. Yes, there are times when you just want to say, "Oh, for heaven sakes, can't you see how bad this is." But they can't. And so the question is what's the distance between where they are and where you want them to be? And what's the stuff that will put people on a path towards something better? Whether that's just watching a few usability tests or having some data that this actually makes a material difference. So depending on who you're trying to convince, different things that will convince them. But we do know UX does know a lot of things about users and user experience and that technology people may not know and the business may know in a way that they can't articulate very well. And so they talk across purposes. But we're midwives.

Lisa Welchman:

So the last question I think if I can take it, Andy. Is that good?

Andy Vitale:

Yeah. Go for it.

Lisa Welchman:

My last question is the obvious one, I think, which is what do we have to look forward to in the next election? What's the next sort of behavior we're trying to modify, experience we're trying to improve? Technology that might be coming down the pike. Is there anything you're so ahead of your time, I think people are just going to try and catch up to the things that you're already doing? So what work are you doing now to try to improve things even further?

Whitney Quesenbery:

This is going to be a really interesting two years because half of the work is going to be shoring up what happened during the selection, taking the best out of it. There are states talking about whether they should be mailing ballots to everybody and how that should work and making the requirements for voting by mail easier and yet more secure. And there's going to be all this really positive work, but there's also going to be some defensive work where people are going to start to say, "Well, we need voter ID." Which is just a terrible idea. Or, "We shouldn't let people vote by mail. It's too easy, too many people vote." And so we've got these two things happening simultaneously and I don't know which will win. I know which I hope will win.

Whitney Quesenbery:

But if you think of it, an election is like a series of iterative design sprints. They're just long, right? Four years is a product life cycle, one release, because we're starting now to work on 2024, right? Because you want to put in those changes in the small elections and build up to the big elections. But I think it's going to be hard to put that genie back in the bottle. We had extraordinary turnout this year and we saw people changing outcomes of elections by turning out. And I think that, well, I can't do what I do without believing in democracy. And I believe that democracy is better when voices are heard and that there's always disruption in change. But that the possibility of a country where we actually do listen to people from all corners and walks of life and where we value everybody's voice is just too big a thing to give up on.

Andy Vitale:

What you're talking about are such amazing things. How can people continue to find out more about what you're doing?

Whitney Quesenbery:

We have a newsletter called Civic Design and you can sign up for it at our website. The audience for it is really election people, so it's election tips. But we also write other things that go on our site. We do podcasts like this. We note those when we're out there. But there are also these amazing local groups, civic tech groups the Code for America Brigades or whatever they're calling them now. There's tons of local things like Baltimore Votes and the MassVOTEs coalition. And those are all ways to get involved in the big picture. You don't have to be doing it full time, but Twitter, actually Twitter, election Twitter is very active. And so if you follow @civicdesign, I mean, that is probably the lightest way to keep up with what we're doing.

Lisa Welchman:

Well again, thank you on two counts, one for this spectacular election that we pulled off, which you were more involved in than probably in this kind of interesting covert way. And thank you for being here with us today. We really appreciate it. And hopefully we'll be back again talking about when we're, I guess, not voting online or at least not this internet no voting online.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Yeah. But we'll be talking about some amazing breakthrough in accessible voting or-

Lisa Welchman:

Wonderful.

Whitney Quesenbery:

Yeah. Thanks so much.

Andy Vitale:

Awesome. Thank you.