What is the role of design in our election process? How can designers better serve our democracy? How might designers work with election administrators to support their work?
The d.school dove into these questions by looking at how US elections are run by the over 10,000 local election offices across the country. A small team spent countless hours with election administrators, at election conferences, and working alongside election experts and voters. They saw first hand how design touches almost every part of the election process.
These nonpartisan efforts aimed to explore how human-centered design can better serve our democracy and improve the election experience for both administrators and voters. From civic engagement to innovations in public policy, design tools and mindsets can help us better understand complicated systems and identify new ways to address them.
Design for Democracy: 2022-2024
Following the d.school’s involvement in the Healthy Elections Project in 2020, we—Nadia Roumani, David Janka, and Thomas Both—dove deeper into how design can better help election officials. Over three years, we: worked on building the design capacity of election administrators; designed and built an exhibit on the role of design in election administration; and developed a Stanford course on design in election administration.
We recruited some wonderful partners to help with this work. First, we established the Election Innovation Corps, which included Stanford undergraduate and graduate students who worked alongside us. We also recruited Tammy Patrick as a Senior Advisor. Tammy has an impressive resume in election administration and is currently the CEO of the Election Center.
Building the capacity of election administrators
During our work with election officials in 2020, we were struck by how many local election officials are innately designers–iterating and adapting spaces and processes to increase efficiency and improve the overall voting experience. While most officials had not been formally exposed to design, many exhibited designerly skills, and all could benefit from some design tools and mindsets of designs. The d.school team worked with Tammy to explore how they might share more design tools and practices with officials to help them improve their work.
To do this, the team ran design workshops at national Election Center Conferences in Pasadena, Houston, and Orlando. The Election Center, aka the National Association of Election Officials, is a nonprofit organization whose members are almost exclusively government employees who work in election administration.
The d.school team shared design behaviors and practices that are particularly relevant to election officials in helping them improve their election administration. These tools ranged from identifying ways in which design is already being used to administer elections to resources for improving the design of an existing experience within the election administration process and design techniques for obtaining feedback from their intended users.
Developing the election administrators // election designers exhibit
As we worked alongside election administrators, we were inspired by their dedication, creativity, and problem solving. We saw that election officials were in fact acting as de facto designers, and we continued to discover ways that design can play a role in improving the election administration process–from voter registration and ballot design to poll worker recruitment and training and to election results reporting.
We developed an in-person exhibit, and subsequently an accompanying book, that highlights the design behaviors and design work that shows up in the process of administering elections. The exhibit highlights many of the design decisions that election officials make throughout the election process. It also celebrates election officials, not only as the logistical experts that they are, but also as invisible designers who strive tirelessly to improve the way they administer elections, all the while overcoming new and increasingly complex hurdles and constraints along the way.
As we built this exhibit, we started to envision where and with whom this material could have the most impact. We first presented our Election Administrators // Election Designers exhibit at the Election Center’s annual conference in 2023. We then shared the exhibit at Stanford University’s Democracy Day at the d.school in November 2023, where the team walked members of the broader Stanford community through the exhibit and engaged in a dialogue on the role of design in election administration. We heard from students and faculty that the exhibit was a great way to showcase how design can play a role in civic engagement, inspiring some to even sign up to volunteer with their local election offices.
In 2024 and 2025, the exhibit will also be on display at the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas and the Edward M Kennedy Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. These organizations have partnered on a collaborative initiative, titled “Bolstering Elections,” to promote investment in American electoral administration and processes. As part of this series, David and Thomas participated in an online webinar on Designing for Democracy, alongside Tammy Patrick.
Designing for democracy: election administration, 2024 spring quarter class
After a few years of working in election administration, we knew we wanted to share this knowledge and experience with Stanford students–specifically the powerful role of design to improve the administration and experience of elections, whether through visual design, service design, strategic design, or systems design. We also sought to excite students about the field of election administration and civic design, and hopefully inspire some to enter this space. We designed and led a new Winter 2024 d.school class titled, Designing for Democracy: Election Administration.
We created a project-based course that exposed students to multiple levels of design. We also designed the class to be an opportunity to work on real-world applications that can help improve how local election offices administer elections. We partnered with the Coalition of Bay Area Election Officials, which was established in 2022 by eleven Bay Area Counties with a goal of working together to increase public trust in elections in their shared media market. It was the ideal partner for a d.school class, offering students the opportunity to obtain a focused understanding of the election administration ecosystem in the Bay Area, and the opportunity to interview and go deep with specific offices.
Sometimes we take things for granted–for us, running a smooth election was one of those things. That is, until we had the opportunity to look behind the curtain, and learn about all the different steps, resources, and coordination required for often small, and under-resourced teams, to run elections in the United States. We are honored to have had the chance to do this meaningful work, and we are grateful to all of the election administrators across the country who made time to meet with our team, and students, over the course of the past four years. We hope that our work adds to the growing appreciation of this field, scholarship in this space, and that it inspires more people to dip their toes in the field of election administration and pursue careers in civic engagement.
Credits
Thomas Both, Nadia Roumani, and David Janka