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.
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