Politics for the day

Mo Rocca, a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning and the host of Electoral Dysfunction, a feature-length documentary, to be broadcast on many PBS stations on 5 November, has an article in The New York Times about ballots:

Our long national nightmare of a presidential campaign comes to a close Tuesday with our quadrennial day of unity, when over a hundred million of us— Democrats, Republicans, and maybe even some of the chronically undecided from those cable news focus groups— will go to the polls. No more recrimination, no more vitriol. “We the people” will come together quietly but resolutely to express our will. Simple as that.
Sorry, must have been dreaming there. It’s very possible that a whole new nightmare will unfold, because casting a ballot in this country is anything but simple.
Most of us don’t think about ballot design until we’re in the voting booth and asking ourselves which oval to fill in, or which box to check, so that our candidates actually get our support. But like so many other aspects of voting that I have explored in this series and in the feature-length documentary Electoral Dysfunction, navigating a ballot can be incredibly confusing. (Anybody familiar with the connect-the-arrow ballot? It’s like a drunken driving test.)
The confusion is understandable. In American elections, ballots are rarely designed by professional designers. And not surprisingly, form follows dysfunction: in Florida, it was Palm Beach County’s infamous butterfly ballot, created by the Democratic elections supervisor Theresa LePore, that arguably cost Al Gore the White House in 2000.
Todd Oldham (photo, top) is a renowned American designer. After I invited him to look over some ballots from across the United States, he was dismayed. As he points out in his video, when it comes to the simple task of casting our votes, extreme confusion calls for an extreme makeover.

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