Ballot design

If you had a web connection at all in late 2000, you've probably seen this...

Before politics stopped being fairly boring in the late summer last year, the book of the year looked like it was going to be Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge. It’s still worth a look when you need a break from Robert Peston – and one of their areas of interest has been ballot design which they have covered with a few posts on their blog here and here.

As the Nudgers mention in their post, this is not a trivial issue – at the time, Ohio was thought to be pivotal in the US presidential elections. And even though there was a popular perception that Dubya ‘stole the election’ in Florida back in 2000, this report suggests that the design of paper ballots is as big an issue as dealing with the flaws in newer forms of voting.

The seriousness of the question in hand was brought home to me earlier when I was given a peek inside someone else’s copy of AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

“…Design for Democracy applies design tools and thinking to increase civic participation by making interactions between the U.S. government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy.”

There’s more about AIGA’s work and an interactive sample ballot form here.

For me, though, the big issue is the way that the candidates are described. At a by-election in 2007, a Conservative candidate was listed on the ballot paper as representing ‘David Cameron’s Conservative Party’ – a decision that was widely seen as a political mistake in retrospect. As far as I can see, it’s not only a politcal mistake, but one that has consequences for the quality of democracy.

Much of the increasingly ‘presidential’ nature of British politics is explained by the fact that national leaders are increasinlgy visible, and a large percentage of voters have no clue about any of their local candidates. Mr Cameron’s move – were it to have taken off in the UK – would have formalised this failing. Among political scientists, this is seen as one of the key causes behind the increasing centralisation of politics.

If there is one thing that the read-write media has the potential to do, it is to personalise politics enough to increase the visibility of local candidates. In the meantime, I quite like this idea from Afghan elections:

Is there any reason why local elections in the UK couldn’t feature candidate’s pictures? Some voters may choose to vote for a face that they recognise – and this in turn could encourage political parties to put more effort into publicising who their candidates are.