Lost in the mail: How to redesign an election for the pandemic
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Good morning, Eamon Barrett here, filling in for Clay Chandler today.
Last Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested the November election should be postponed until after the pandemic, claiming that an increase in mail-in voting would lead to an increase in voter fraud. There’s no evidence to support Trump’s claim, but there is evidence that an increase in vote-by-mail will strain a system ill-equipped to handle it, creating a new imperative for designers to rethink how the U.S. casts its ballots.
The modern push for electoral redesign arguably began after the 2000 vote and the infamous Floridian “butterfly ballot,” where the names of candidates aligned with the wrong checkbox. Some blame the confusing ballot design for costing Al Gore the election.
The controversy prompted the University of Illinois at Chicago to launch the Voting Experience Redesign Initiative (VERI), which produced new design standards for ballots and voting stations. Since then, other design labs, such as IDEO, have tackled the issue of electoral design too, while the work of VERI, now known as AIGA’s Design for Democracy initiative, continues.
Ballot layouts and booth design are issues of voting apparatus; the pandemic has highlighted problems with the voting process. In the era of social distancing, mail-in voting has become an obvious alternative to standing in line at polling places. In primaries across 16 states since the end of April, mail-in ballots counted for 80% of voter turnout, compared to 12% in 2016.
According to research published last month by MIT, mail-in ballots have a higher likelihood of being unfairly discounted due to errors in processing. In 2016, the report says, 4% of all mail-in ballots for the national election were unfairly excluded, or “lost.”
The report warns that as more states engage in vote-by-mail, the percentage will likely increase as administrators struggle to implement effective systems. New York, for example, allowed votes in its disastrous June primary to be counted so long as the postmark on the returning envelope was dated before the election deadline. The state had issued ballots with prepaid return envelopes—good. However, the postal service usually doesn’t postmark prepaid envelopes and, according to a lawsuit against the primary, thousands of votes in prepaid envelopes were “lost” because they didn’t have a postmark.
That’s just one hitch in vote-by-mail that needs to be ironed out. (Speaking of, in 2008, California delayed its vote count because tens of thousands of postal votes literally needed ironing out—they had been crumpled in the mail and had to be flattened before being fed into the tabulator.)
If the upswing in vote-by-mail continues as expected in November, there are doubts the U.S. postal service and state electoral officials are equipped for the challenge. Preparing them requires funding—to the tune of about $1 billion—as well as effective and efficient system management.
A week from today, on August 11, the Brennan Center For Justice is hosting a talk entitled Bad Ballots and Lost Vote: The Path to Better Ballot Design, that will likely address a lot of these issues. It should be worth tuning into.
More below.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com