Voting rules can be confusing, but filling out a form shouldn’t be

Maybe it’s the uber importance of voting this year or the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment,  but for whatever reason I’ve gotten really into voting laws and the history of voting. Like did you know that we (by that I mean men) used to vote viva voce - with the voice. Can you imagine going to the polls nowadays and announcing to the entire room who you were voting for? 

I’m also indignant and exasperated that voting is way harder than it should be with the confusing rules, the bullshit rhetoric about fraud, and now COVID. Voting should be a really a boring endeavor. And by that I mean the actual physical act of voting, of engaging with the paper or the electronic ballot, not the emotional component or the sense of civic duty, not the anxiety over how you’re going to vote, or who’s going to win. The literal act of voting should be so boring and straightforward it’s just like dealing with every other survey or multiple-choice test you’d taken since you could hold a pencil. 

If you want to vote absentee, getting your absentee ballot should be equally as boring if you live in one of the 40 states that do not automatically send ballots to residents. My state of Illinois is one of these 40 and thankfully, requesting an absentee ballot online was easy peasy. The website I bought a sweater dress from had a more complex series of forms than the Illinois Secretary of State’s office. 

But here’s my bugaboo: requesting a ballot isn’t always easy. I mean, yes, it’s ridiculous that there are 10 states that just send ballots to voters and Wisconsin, for example, makes you upload an image of your photo ID before it will mail you one. But I’m talking about the issues with the websites themselves that could make filling out an application for an absentee ballot difficult, especially if you are 1 in 5 Americans with a disability. 

Voting can be a confusing process, but filling out a form shouldn’t be. We fill out forms all the time when we buy stuff online, when we need a new driver’s license, when we go to our doctors’ offices. It’s mindless drudgery, time that we could be spending baking cakes or playing video games. 

Things that can make any kind of work online easy, whether it’s reading an article, buying shoes, checking a bank statement, or requesting a ballot are those mundane, unnoticed design elements. Like, providing a label to a form field so you know what information to put in. Or making sure the colors on the website contrast enough that you can actually read the information. 

And yet, often websites don’t incorporate these basic elements or follow accessibility guidelines. A study of all 50 state voting websites revealed that many were riddled with some basic problems that make them hard to use. The average score of the websites was 77% (a C grade?!). 20 websites scored below 76%. This is bad for anyone with a disability, for anyone who needs to use a screen reader or has a vision or mobility impairment. Aside from proper color schemes and labels, issues were technical things like: 

• Keyboard focus (when you use the tab key instead of a mouse, you see the selected element of the page outlined) 

• Tab order (when you hit the tab key, the order of the outlined elements matches the visual order of the page) 

Now I realize this is not the most exciting design or engineering work. But it’s vital for anyone who comes to the website that basic accessibility guidelines are followed. And we all do benefit from proper form field labeling. And that’s the thing - if you’ve ever found a website difficult to use and the information hard to follow, it’s probably not you. It’s probably the website. These little things add up, and they matter.

As we’re all aware, voting this year is both critical and nerve-wracking because of the pandemic and Trump’s fear mongering. Boring it is not! Legislators have managed to weaponize some of the most mundane things we humans ever have to do: fill out forms and take a multiple choice test. Let’s not add poor website design on top of the nonsensical rules of the voting process. Voting websites that are not accessible (I’m looking at you, Rhode Island) are both a pain to use and could actively prevent citizens from fulfilling a constitutional right. 

It’s critical to get these basic things right. This is very much within the power of the designers and engineers who maintain the websites. These websites obviously must adhere to and communicate the rules, but they can take care to ensure the instructions are visually clear and information easy to input so citizens can fill out a form to get their ballot in the mail.

Are you registered to vote? How are you voting this year?

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Romance novels show how history bends toward justice

My preferred way to wind down is to read a Romance novel, especially a Historical Romance with a political conflict. The world is on fire and we are stuck in our homes as a critical election draws near, but a really good Romance novel can take me on a journey with fascinating characters and a fast-moving plot that, of course, includes a love angle and a happy ending. The stories with a political conflict go beyond pleasure-reading for me. Though they give me a chance to run away from the world’s problems, they help me cope with them too.

I love escaping into the “poofy dress” Historicals because I can pretend the iPhone hasn’t been invented yet and indulge in that younger version of myself, the one who raided my mom’s closet and played dress up. Like other Romance novels, these stories show women navigating family, career, and relationship struggles. Female desire is treated as normal and not a shameful thing, as it so frequently is in real life. In other words, we see women living with all the messiness that comes with being a real person. I’m also desperate for something fun where you know in a way that you cannot possibly know in any other aspect of your life that it’s all going to be OK. 

As we celebrate the anniversary of the 19th amendment this month, I find myself thinking a lot about the history of how we got here, to this moment, mere months away from an election where Donald Trump and Republicans are actively working to prevent individuals from voting. I think about how the 15th amendment enfranchised formerly enslaved men to vote, how women of all backgrounds (BIPOC, white, queer, poor, wealthy) had no choice but to fight for 50 more years for the passage of the 19th amendment. That amendment may have enfranchised millions of women, but Native Americans and those of Asian ancestry were not legally able to vote yet. Black women and men continued to face tremendous barriers to voting. I think about how John Lewis, famed leader in the Civil Rights Movement, was one man of scores of others who did the work to get the Voting Rights Act passed, and how that act was decimated in 2013, how we are dealing with the consequences today. 

Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore and An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole are especially relevant to the moment we’re in right now: celebrating women winning the right to vote while the fight continues to ensure everyone can actually exercise that right on November 3. 

Bringing Down the Duke follows brilliant, yet dirt poor student and suffragist Annabelle Archer in late 19th-century England who tries to convince aristocrats in government to abolish the Married Women’s Property Act, which prevented women from keeping their own property when they married. This was in 1879. Property-owning women (or those married to a man who owned property) were granted the right to vote in 1918 in Britain. All women, regardless of property, could finally vote a decade later; 1920 in the USA. 

 An Extraordinary Union follows quick and courageous Elle Burns who poses as a slave in a Virginia home during the Civil War in order to spy for the Union Army. She gathers intel vital to taking down a Confederate plot in 1862. The Civil War ended in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued two years prior, but Texas ignored the memo until June 19, 1865. The 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the vote, was ratified in 1870.

These two Romance novels are stories about women fighting for justice, for the rights they should have had from the get go. They are based in a reality of the recent past and show not the achievement of the end goal (winning the vote, ending slavery and the Civil War) but importantly the work and the risk involved in winning the much smaller victories. In other words, they show the small steps on that much longer road toward justice. 

Bringing Down the Duke and An Extraordinary Union also resonate on a personal level. These stories are by women, about women. They do what good fiction does: show the world through someone else’s eyes and heart. In these stories, women have the space to feel deeply, whether it’s joy, anger, or any other damn thing she pleases. They do extraordinary things while going through the minutiae of their daily lives, while dealing with risk and failure, while working through both personal and romantic challenges. It drives me nuts when stories dismiss romantic feelings or relationships as if they operate in some sphere totally separated from the rest of your daily life. Love is not separate. John Lewis, monumental figure that he was, was also a man who married and had a child.

We’ve heard the quote “the arc of history bends toward justice” (though this year feels more like "one step forward, two steps back"). Annabelle Archer and Elle Burns remind me that history doesn't bend on its own. It is bent by the hard work of heroes like John Lewis but also by the less-celebrated work of women—by Annabelle, a suffragist, who is the hardest working and smartest person in any room; by Elle Burns, who takes on phenomenal risk to herself when she poses as a slave in a Confederate-controlled home. Annabelle struggles to be heard against the stigmatism of her poverty. Elle struggles against racism and white supremacy. Both of these women are continuously underestimated because of their gender. When I look for inspiration, when I need a reminder that small actions today can payoff in the end, when I need to escape into a world where I know these actions have positive, long-reaching consequences, I find it in the stories of Annabelle and Elle.