#406 2000 · AIGA Design for Democracy · Public administration / graphic designwrong-door
After Florida's 'butterfly ballot' cost thousands of voters their intended vote, the people who fixed it weren't election lawyers — they were typographers.
the problem
a system fails because of how information is visually laid out, but the professionals responsible for it have no design training and treat the failure as a legal or procedural issue instead
background
In the 2000 US presidential election, Palm Beach County's infamous 'butterfly ballot' laid out candidate names and punch holes so confusingly that thousands of voters, by later analysis, punched a hole for a different candidate than they intended — a design failure with real consequences in one of the closest elections in American history. The institutions responsible for ballots, county election boards and election law offices, had no graphic design training and no established process for catching a layout problem like this before it caused real votes to be miscounted.
The American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), a professional graphic design association, saw an entirely different diagnosis than the legal and procedural fixes being debated in the election's aftermath: ballots and election materials were fundamentally an information-design problem — layout, typography, visual hierarchy — that the design profession, not election administrators alone, was best equipped to solve.
the move
AIGA launched its Design for Democracy initiative, bringing professional graphic designers directly into election administration to redesign ballots, registration forms, polling place signage and poll-worker materials using established usability and typography principles. Designer Marcia Lausen partnered directly with the Cook County (Chicago) Clerk's office, redesigning the county's ballot — including a notoriously crowded 73-candidate, 10-page judicial retention ballot — with a clearer typeface, eliminated interlaced yes/no punch layouts, and visual grouping connecting each name directly to its corresponding punch hole.
the payoff
The Cook County redesign measurably reduced the number of voters who failed to successfully cast a vote on the crowded judicial retention ballot, and Lausen's design principles remained in use across Cook County elections for years afterward. AIGA's Design for Democracy resources and ballot-design guidelines were subsequently adopted by multiple state and county election offices beyond Illinois as reference standards for clear ballot design.
what came after
Design for Democracy is credited with establishing ballot and election-material design as a recognized specialty within graphic design and election administration, directly influencing the US Election Assistance Commission's later ballot design guidance — the same reframing, treating a systemic usability failure as a design problem rather than a legal or procedural one, is now standard practice across government forms, healthcare consent documents and financial disclosure design.
references
- [1]Redesigning The VoteSmithsonian Magazine, 2008smithsonianmag.com
- [2]Artifact: 2000 Palm Beach County BallotDesign Observer, 2020designobserver.com