Today, an estimated half a million people in New Hampshire will go to the polls to vote in the Republican and Democratic primaries, and in the weeks ahead, many other Americans will vote as well. Depending on where you live, you’re guaranteed to get a totally different voting experience compared to someone in another state, or even another county. That’s because the physical design of polling stations varies wildly across the U.S.: they’re located in libraries, civic centers, grocery stores, and other random places, and there isn’t a universal set of rules that tells officials how to set up polling stations. But new research suggests that the design of polling stations is critical to the voting process—and if we don’t design these places well, some people may decide not to vote. Just like an ATM machine or public transportation, polling stations are systems, and their poor or great design could influence whether voters use them. When people deal with a badly designed system—one that’s inconvenient, confusing, or takes too much time—they might make mistakes or avoid the system altogether. The problem with polling stations is that people can’t just switch to a different location—they have to use the one to which they’re assigned (unless they vote by mail). Rice University researchers Claudia Acemyan and Phil Kortum say this all-or-nothing situation, along with a poorly designed system, could disenfranchise people. Since there currently aren’t general design standards for polling places, they’ve set out to create a set of guidelines, based on science.
In order to discover what makes the best design, the researchers measured people’s preferences for different physical layouts of polling stations. In their recent study, published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, they asked 35 students at Rice University to rate how usable polling places seemed to them, based on photo renderings. In the renderings, Acemyan and Kortum varied the configuration of voting machines in the room (two rows facing each other, one row facing the back wall, or one row facing the entrance), the amount of space between voting machines (0.75 meters, or no space), and whether the voting machines had dividers. The researchers used renderings instead of an actual physical room so that they could tightly control for other variables that might influence people’s perceptions of usability, like lighting or the density of people in the room.
When Acemyan and Kortum analyzed students’ ratings of the different environments, they saw a clear (and perhaps not surprising) trend. People thought the most usable polling stations were ones with dividers, with space between the voting machines, and with one row of voting machines placed so that voters faced the entrance. The researchers also found that people rated the two rows of voting machines facing each other as the least usable, compared to other configurations.
Full Article: How Polling Station Design Could Influence Elections | Co.Design | business + design.