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This summer, I have chosen to focus on electoral ballot design in Illinois. I have always been interesting in elections and how they’re conducted, so I was somewhat familiar with the tedious, bureaucratic processes involved in running an election. However, upon beginning my research into the various ballots used across the state of Illinois, I have quickly come to realize that the whole process is far more disorganized and decentralized than I had originally thought. There are 102 counties in Illinois, as well as 6 elections commissions, all 108 of which have their own ballots. My intention for starting this project stems from my own personal experiences voting in Illinois. I found the ballot to be crowded and chaotic, so I was curious to see if other places in Illinois were experiencing the same dissatisfaction.
My first step is to gather county ballots and assess them (that’s the step I’m on currently). After that, the plan is to test the current ballots across the state for usability and readability. With that data and the prior analysis of the ballots, I will have enough information to design a new, unified ballot that could be used across the entire state.
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For the past two weeks I have been coordinating with each of the counties and elections commissions to obtain copies of their sample ballots. Of the 108 counties, 74 of them had easily accessible contact information. I have since heard back from 34 counties. Realistically I knew the best strategy was to message as many as possible, to account for the fact that my emails would get lost in some inboxes very quickly. Illinois has an online guide on one of the board of elections subpages on best ballot practices, and I have already found that many counties that have gotten back to me do not follow those best practices.
However, I have slightly changed the scope of my research project to include the elections vendors, as they are the primary people who are in charge of ballot design, not the counties. Illinois has five approved elections vendors, and each county is allowed to pick its own, which accounts for some of the ballot variation. I would like to include in my research informal interviews with elections vendor designers in charge of the ballots to determine where the ballot style variations among counties with the same vendor comes from.