New Voting Process Pilot in L.A. County

I wrote about this process last in a 2014 post.

Americans will wait in long lines for a rollercoaster at Six Flags or to get into a nightclub, because the rewards justify the inconvenience. There is little in the way of an immediate reward, though, for inching through lines to vote, especially if your candidate ends up losing. And then there’s the fact that so many things we used to wait in line for, we now don’t, we can skip the grocery lines with Instacart, skip cab lines to Uber, and carry plane tickets on our smartphones.

Ideo, is a global design firm that prides itself on taking a “human-centered” approach to rethinking things that the common person probably doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about. Add voting to that list. In 2013, Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan invited Ideo to help conjure up a new voting system that’s more responsive and accessible than the county’s current decades-old system. The county has since spent close to $15 million with the design firm in creating what they believe will be the Zipcar of voting.

The result is a system of portable, collapsable touchscreen monitors, one day innovators will come up with something universally less gross than touchscreens, that voters can access at multiple locations instead of having to visit an assigned polling location.

Users have the option of an "expedited experience" afforded by pre-marking their votes on a web platform Ideo calls the Interactive Sample Ballot (ISB). The voting machine scans the ISB when voters arrive at a polling location. The ISB pre-populates the ballot, the user verifies that the votes are correct, they can change their votes at this time, too. Then the voting machine prints out a hardcopy. Alternatively, voters can just show up at a the polling place and make their choices via the touch screen. In either case, the machine prints a hardcopy that the user reviews and feeds through a scanner in the machine. Ballots are collected and counted at a centralized location.

"Although we are designing a new system, there are things out there that people are used to, and part of our role as designers is to leverage some of those experiences," Ideo’s lead designer Blaise Bertrand said. "What we’re working on is a behavioral change, and it’s very important to make that transition as smooth as possible so familiarity is important.”

Once the Ideo design is approved, the county will then have to traverse the state and federal elections regulation process, which will be its own adventure. Still, L.A. County’s focus on the user, the voter, is a starting point worth applauding given that not many other jurisdictions have considered the same. It’s the reason why voting is such a dull activity to begin with.

The county is hoping to bring its new voting arcade online by 2020.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker