The last two presidential elections have been stolen. This has nothing to do with ballot design. To claim otherwise is, at best, sadly misguided; at worst, shameless self-promotion.
Oh My God,
No wonder you poor guys end up with Presidents like George Bush. It looks like the ballot papers are made as complicated as possible, and as much room for misinterpretation as possible. I live in Germany and here The Ballot Forms are DIN Standard Forms with little or no room for error or misinterpretation. Hilarious to think of some shaky handed “senior resident” filling in the circle “completely and without going outside” the 0.75pt border – that is ridiculous! Hopefully you guys get lucky this election and a sane candidate will be chosen (Mr. Obama)
By far the most critical factor in our lives is information architecture. Having elections is almost pre-historic in an age where info arch can be so so designer.
I don’t think there’s much of a case to argue against clear ballot design – unless, of course, the purpose is to disenfranchise voters. But then there’s also the small matter of gerrymandering, the staggered celebration of primaries (i.e. as opposed to a national or at least large, regional primaries system where sufficiently attractive numbers of delegates are in play), the scourge of caucuses, the financing of campaigns (which ought to be public sourced by law, with equal allotment of air time so candidate can focus on honing their message, for a change, as opposed to drilling the audience in a few selected states to insanity), the constricting nature of a two-party system leaving extremely little room for occasional kicks in the shin, a sadly general dislike of for substantive political discussion (and discourse) especially when the notion of “ideology” comes into play, and a long list of other things that fill a big chunk of the intertubes.
The last two presidential elections have been stolen. This has nothing to do with ballot design. To claim otherwise is, at best, sadly misguided; at worst, shameless self-promotion.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0813-29.htm
http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/voter-fraud-august-2005/
Except that the US isn’t an actual democracy, it’s a republic…
Oh My God,
No wonder you poor guys end up with Presidents like George Bush. It looks like the ballot papers are made as complicated as possible, and as much room for misinterpretation as possible. I live in Germany and here The Ballot Forms are DIN Standard Forms with little or no room for error or misinterpretation. Hilarious to think of some shaky handed “senior resident” filling in the circle “completely and without going outside” the 0.75pt border – that is ridiculous! Hopefully you guys get lucky this election and a sane candidate will be chosen (Mr. Obama)
By far the most critical factor in our lives is information architecture. Having elections is almost pre-historic in an age where info arch can be so so designer.
Yes, the US has much to learn about selecting its leaders — from Germany.
I don’t think there’s much of a case to argue against clear ballot design – unless, of course, the purpose is to disenfranchise voters. But then there’s also the small matter of gerrymandering, the staggered celebration of primaries (i.e. as opposed to a national or at least large, regional primaries system where sufficiently attractive numbers of delegates are in play), the scourge of caucuses, the financing of campaigns (which ought to be public sourced by law, with equal allotment of air time so candidate can focus on honing their message, for a change, as opposed to drilling the audience in a few selected states to insanity), the constricting nature of a two-party system leaving extremely little room for occasional kicks in the shin, a sadly general dislike of for substantive political discussion (and discourse) especially when the notion of “ideology” comes into play, and a long list of other things that fill a big chunk of the intertubes.
Just sayin’.
Wahhh, i missed you at DLS-CSB in Manila…. btw, Katherine V. Lara is my cousin. Hope to see you back for some R&R!