During the February 2003 elections, a poster between a sunny park and heavily trafficked sidewalk pointed out my neighborhood polling place. Generally, as a serial apartment renter in the Chicago area, I scour confusing websites for my voting location, ironically secretive for a place where civil rights are exercised. So I was immediately impressed by the direct poster: A blue band covered with the right-aligned sans serif words polling place.

Simple, right? Not so fast. Cook County is among the first area to utilize designers in the election process, doing away with some common government design blunders: center-aligned script, low contrast, not enough white space. Change has not been simple, either: Efforts by designers, government officials, and university students have all been needed to overhaul a mammoth election system that was at one time plagued by dysfunctional design.

BLACK TUESDAY
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2000, a confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, Fla., led to thousands of votes being mistakenly cast for independent Pat Buchanan. By now we're all familiar with this story: The ballot design mishap likely led to Gore's loss of the presidential election. But the results were fortuitous for some designers looking to spread awareness about improvements that could be made in government design. A flurry of newspaper articles grabbed the public's attention: an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Paula Scher and an equally critical, and possibly more productive, op-ed in the Chicago Tribune by Marcia Lausen. I'm sitting in Studio Lab with Lausen, watching a whirring digital device project the image of a Cook County ballot on the immaculate white walls. Bob Zeni, former public relations chair of AIGA Chicago, suggested that the chapter go to the Chicago Tribune with an op-ed piece: Like Scher's op-ed, Lausen's broke down the problems of a deficiently designed butterfly ballot, and additionally she offered an alternative.

"This is a butterfly ballot we had in Chicago," says Lausen, pointing wearily to a slide projection of her op-ed graphic. "In 2000, this is the section on judicial retention-it's ten total pages, five spreads. The yes/no votes are running across the center, the canvas names are in all caps-condensed in the most illegible type you can have-and this question takes up a lot of space since it's repeated several times in English and Spanish." While deciding if judges should keep their seats doesn't have the importance of, say, the presidential race, it is indicative of a larger problem: Cook County had let design fall by the wayside in the election process. In fact, Palm Beach County barely beat Cook for the most votes miscast in the 2000 presidential election. "[In the ballot] we wanted to take the problems and offer a solution, without changing the technology. Simple design changes could improve this greatly," Lausen explains.

The next slide pops up with the op-ed piece: streamlined questions, larger names with more room for each candidate. "It's still too dense for a ballot," she says, like any graphic designer striving for perfection, "But it's much more legible."

ELECTION EVANGELISM
Zeni took the proposed redesign not only to the Chicago Tribune, but also to the City of Chicago and the Office of the Cook County Clerk, David Orr. The AIGA Chicago chapter, under the direction of then-president Lance Rutter, formed a nonprofit collaborative-the Voting Experience Redesign Initiative or VERI. The group included Zeni, Lausen, Rutter, industrial designer Stephen Melamed, and a research team from Sapient, led by Dori Tunstall.

"We started off thinking this would go nationwide and we'd be done by 2004," says Lausen, who acted as the group's information design director. Not so. Changing America's voting design would become Lausen's six-year pro-bono project, consuming her holidays and weekends. "As we moved beyond a local effort, in 2003 VERI became the Election Design program of Design for Democracy, an existing national AIGA advocacy effort started by Ric Grefé, who has served as advisor/visionary leader every step of the way," Lausen explains. She has since been integral to the effort; she's a self-described "design evangelist." And truly, redesigning America's elections beckons Lausen like a religious calling, one that most would have abandoned after the first battle: changing the law. To get started on a new ballot design, it was necessary to hunt through the official election code. Back to the present: Lausen flips the slide and a telephone book-sized rule book comes on screen. She's positioned it on a black background. The stark background dramatizes the presentation. "This is lawyers dictating ballot design," says Lausen. "There are specifications on type in inches, and somewhere it points out that lowercase letters are illegal in the state of Illinois."

When Design for Democracy and Orr's office attempted to implement a new and better ballot design, lawyers, county officials, and election judges-the volunteers who man polling places-were, surprisingly, nearly always willing to make improvements. Yet those encountered in the regional election circuit were not easily sold on the merits of design. "The word design, to many, means decoration," says Lausen. "I got a lot of comments like 'What are you gonna do? Put flowers on the ballot?" Lausen decided educating decision makers about design would be essential. "The first time I spoke in front of election officials, they titled my talk 'Creative Ballot Design' and instead of telling them to change the name, I decided to talk about why the title was all wrong-how ballot design was all about legibility and had little to do with creativity. It had to do with problem solving."

A solution clicked in Lausen's mind when, during one of her educational sessions, someone asked, "Can you go back through all those rules?" Lausen realized that this crowd might not be keen on wrapping their heads around visual design, but they liked to follow rules. Lausen broke ballot design into "laws": "One: Lowercase letters are more legible because the words form unique shapes that aid identification," says Lausen, kicking off the list. "Two: There's no reason of any kind to use centered type in election design- centered type forces you to go back to a new place each time you go to another line. It's only expected in wedding invitations. Three: Every change in type-height, weight, size, width-should have a meaning. Four: The most legible type is black on white. Give the most important information—the candidate's name—the most contrast."

In the fall of 2002, Lausen's ballot finally came out. "There was this kind of miracle," she enthuses. "Albert Klumpp, a Ph.D. political science student at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) called me up and said, 'You're not going to believe this, but my research topic is retention elections.'" Klumpp's statistical analysis of the numbers of retention votes cast in 2002 and 2004 proved the success of the redesign. For anyone who was skeptical that an improved ballot design would affect the election, the evidence proved otherwise.

FROM BETTER BALLOTS TO ENHANCED ENVELOPES
After the success of the ballots, Cook County looked for other ways to revamp designs of the election system. Enter Veronica Belsuzarri. Belsuzarri is now one of a handful of designers to be employed in election design-a job she blames solely on being at the right place at the right time. In the fall of 2001, Lausen and Melamed taught senior-level studio classes on election design at the School of Art and Design at UIC. In Lausen's graphic design class and Melamed's industrial design class, each student was assigned a component of the election process, which included everything from posters to booths to aspects that the public doesn't get to see like envelopes and voting supply carriers. County officials served as real clients and reviewed the projects in final critiques.

"In the class everybody had to work together and make proposals for a unified system," says Belsuzarri, one of the students at the time. "I worked particularly on envelopes." They transport the votes and any official forms from the polls to a tallying station. "The envelopes are the interface that just the judges see. They were making the poll workers confused. I was hired because it was the most immediate need." Belsuzarri shoots me a knowing glance, "Unlike citizens, the judges can complain directly to the election department when things don't go right."

Belsuzarri is modest: When I meet with her she's funny and quick to laugh. Best of all, she acts blasé when the frustrations inherent in a bureaucracy erupt. Her envelopes segued from a class project to a freelance job when they caught the eye of Orr's spokesman, Scott Burnham, in the critique.

"Before, it was hard to figure out what was what," says Belsuzarri. "Everything was in different colors, different sizes, different fonts because a set of envelopes doesn't go to one printer, it goes to four printers. The layout didn't work right. They would have envelopes that were really small for forms that were really large." She holds up a crisp blue envelope, "So I designed them so contents would have a relationship to their envelopes. We made a color-coded system-blue is for use during the election, red means open after 7 p.m. So right away the judges would know if it was something they needed to look at."

Since that first design, Cook County has hired Belsuzarri to revamp everything: posters, voting rights material, language assistance material, a telephone book-sized election guide, absentee ballots, mailers, and optical scans or paper ballots, for the upcoming elections. Not bad, says Belsuzarri, for a job straight out of undergraduate school. Still, it hasn't always been smooth sailing. "There are so many people involved and you have to get approval on everything," she says. She has noticed a steady progression in the county's trust in design. "They had a thing for flag red-it was a more 'serious red.' They'd argue against the reds that were 'too fun,'" Belsuzarri laughs. "Now, a few years later, they're like, 'Is the color OK with you?' It's nice to see the change: Things working and [the county] wanting to make it better."

GET OUT THE VOTERS
"It's one thing to redesign a ballot, it's another thing to redesign a whole election system," says Dori Tunstall, Ph.D., whose research on Cook County voters has been used to inform the election redesign. A former member of the experience modeling group for Sapient (and now associate professor of Design Anthropology in the School of Art and Design at UIC, where she directed research efforts of the election design courses), Tunstall headed the Sapient team of Anna Choi, Joan Afton, and Martha Cotton. They compiled observations of Cook County polling places, residents, and election judges, then scoured newspaper articles for news on the 2000 election that reported the snags of badly made ballots.

In spring 2001, they came up with a typology of different voters. "We described a generic version of the voting experience in a polling place," says Tunstall. "This is where a lot of the ideas for the design came through in terms of understanding the role of judges, understanding how people navigate through the space, signage, the types of materials that people read." Then they created an opportunity map, which the election design students used as a research resource for their projects.

I ask her how she thinks her research ultimately improved election turnout. "Design is just one factor in a million of others. If it's effective, it's invisible. It makes that part of the process transparent so you can focus on other things, like the fact that there aren't any candidates that you'd want to vote for."

AHEAD OF THE CURVE
After years of revamping the election system, Cook County can take a break. The epiclength election manual has been rewritten; ballots have been designed, redesigned, and honed-down to fine art.

"We're way ahead of the curve," an enthusiastic David Orr tells me over the phone. At a recent meeting for the Election Assistance Commission (an independent group that promotes effective elections under federal law), "There was a whole session dedicated to [design]. People were using Cook County and our office as the model for what to do," he says, "More importantly we believe it helps the voters. It's less of a problem for most of the country that have much smaller ballots. They don't have as much of a challenge. Our ballots are, for the most part, four times longer than most areas'. The challenge is greater." When the county was getting acclimated to the redesign, Orr says, "Many were thinking like me: My notion of what may be fine for me, may not be the best way to reach people." Now, Orr's not only concerned about making things work, he also lauds an exciting aesthetic. He raves over youthful posters that a UIC class made to promote voting and he praise's Belsuzarri for her designs. He has a feeling, like I did first passing the polling place poster, that a compelling message incites pride, a sort of civic duty, in the voting process.

FORECASTING VOTES
Lausen's evangelism might actually run its course. She's compiled all of her work into a book that will be distributed among the nation's many election offices. The book has templates, tips, everything she's learned from the Cook County process and much that's been garnered from the dozens of designers and government workers involved. She hopes that every state, county, and city will be inspired to improve its design. Optimistically, Belsuzarri would like some time to observe how the designs are affecting voters and election judges, taking note of any complaints. But she has a rocky path ahead: This year's ballots were primarily made on a touch screen, a method that has not put design in the forefront. According to Orr, though, he's not putting design aside anytime soon. "Everything that we put out, we want to try and have design help with." And while that might not be a happy ending to six years of work, election design is at least, finally, swiftly moving forward.

Lausen's book, Design for Democracy: Election Design, is available through AIGA Design Press/New Riders, www.newriders.com.