"Microwaving popcorn could have brought voting to a standstill..."

...writes Ted Selker of one Election Day near-disaster at a polling place in Nevada. To demonstrate how "[s]mall design decisions have major consequence," Selker highlights how poll workers there hoped to power 20 voting machines through a single outlet. It didn't work, of course, and when the batteries went kaput shortly thereafter they opted for another outlet that also powered a microwave oven. 

After witnessing comparable Election Day fiascoes elsewhere, Selker concluded that these problems are most often ones of design -- polling places are "often hard to navigate and not well thought out." As he explains in this Wired.com post, Selker thought that if polling places accommodated voters the way, say, a Starbucks catered to coffee drinkers then voters' experiences would improve. Voter turnout would increase thereby, a belief later confirmed by physical design methods expert Tom Burchard: "The challenge is to get people feeling like they took part in democracy, in the fulfillment of their citizenship rather than feeling like they just finished the SAT, hoping they filled in all the ovals right under pressure.” But Selker notes:

There’s a whole different organizational structure for voting [than for Starbucks], because...[of t]he autonomy of local governments in polling decisions... So it’s like trying to improve design decisions over tens of thousands of independent, small coffee shops across the country.

Nevertheless, Selker and his crew set out to create -- with the help of an Election Assistance Commission grant -- a software program that could help election officials design more efficient polling places. The result: an app called the Polling Place Support Tool that "works as a visual planner for polling places before election day and helps polling-place staff track glitches and bottlenecks during the big event." It also provides poll workers a forum for discussing improvements to polling place structure and design. As Selker explains:

The app is for voting staff and volunteers. It lets them view paths and bottlenecks as they position registration tables, voting booths, (and even electrical outlets) on a floor plan of their polling place. Then on election day, it helps keep a log by storing photos of potential problems, allowing staffers to post and annotate them with text, and pin them to the floor plan.

 

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The goal is to help election officials learn how to design and administer polling places with the sophistication of top designers of high-throughput stores. Without losing the privacy, security, and integrity of the system, we need to think like the customer and anticipate any potential snafus in the physical space, staff training, digital tools, and the transitions between them.

The program is set to be tested by election officials in Maryland and L.A. county later this year.