Partnering is powerful

We formed the Center for Civic Design 4 years ago this week. Yay! Happy Birthday to us! It seems like yesterday, but so much has happened. (For a glimpse, just check out the Projects section of our website.) There have been at least a dozen big projects, and many more small projects, in which we learned things like:

• There are about 10 big questions that voters have about elections, and you can answer them on your website pretty easily.
• Lots of voters don’t know what the mechanics of voting are after they arrive at a polling place, but it’s easy to address this gap through voter information and outreach.
• It is possible to have a system for sending blank ballots to voters that they can mark, print, and return that is secure and accessible.
• The best electronic poll books are efficient and effective for poll workers to use, and poll workers feel confident using them.
• When election administrators have useful tools that are easy to implement, their work gets easier and more accurate, fewer votes are lost to mistakes made by workers and voters, and everyone trusts elections more.

This birthday isn’t really about us. It’s about you. We couldn’t have done any of this work without people like you. Over the last 4 years, we’ve partnered with election officials at every level of government to learn how elections work in real life. We have been on the ground with you, learning why things are the way they are. And we hope we’ve given you useful tools and techniques in return.

We’re not done. We are purpose-driven to ensure that voters can vote the way they intend. We think that the best way to do that is by working toward making every interaction that the public has with government efficient, effective, and pleasant. That means helping election administrators build their technical, design, and management skills for incremental improvements election by election.

Over the next few years, we’ll be working on tools and templates for vote-by-mail, guidelines for making materials in languages other than English, best practices for NVRA compliance and automatic voter registration, and exemplar materials for workers in vote centers.

None of that happens without partners, like you.

For helping us understand how elections work and what your specific work is like, thank you.

For letting us into your offices, polling places, and conferences, thank you.

For working with us directly on projects and sharing your expertise, thank you.

For giving us feedback on the templates and tools that we make, thank you.

To all the town, county, state, and federal election officials we’ve already worked with, thank you! To those we haven’t partnered with, yet, let us know what we can do to help.

Thank you for the work you do!  You are amazing partners for us, and for one another.

From the team at the Center for Civic Design —
Dana, Whitney, Maggie, and Taapsi

P.S. A couple of our friends sent us birthday wishes, and we thought we would share them with you:

The Center for Civic Design is a reliable resource we have now counted on for years. Because of their expertise, we enlisted their help with our sample ballot layout and vote by mail instructions. They also assisted us with plain language initiatives and taught us how to conduct on-the-spot usability testing to improve our processes and materials.

Their solid design research has guided us in producing well-designed materials to engage our citizens. As a result, we are better achieving our customer service commitment.

The elections community is fortunate to have the Center for Civic Design as a reliable roadmap for usability and accessibility.

– Dean C. Logan
Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk

 

“I’m proud to have been a fan of, and collaborator with, the Center on Civic Design before it even existed … Dana and Whitney’s work on numerous projects – especially the Field Guides and other design-focused work with election officials and poll workers – has been nothing short of transformational. Looking back, I didn’t realize how important election design was; now, I can’t imagine the field of elections without it. That wouldn’t have happened without the Center!“

– Doug Chapin
director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration
Humphrey School of Public Administration
University of Minnesota