Last year, a bipartisan commission established by President Obama declared that the U.S. faces an “impending crisis in voting technology.” After the 2000 Florida recount showed the world that the American presidency could be determined by hanging chads, Congress set aside $3.3 billion, most of it to help local election officials upgrade their voting machinery. Bureaucrats with relatively little experience buying advanced technology rushed to purchase machines developed to satisfy the sudden demand. Those devices, designed in the years when Palm and Nokia owned the smartphone market, are mostly outdated. There’s no new money on the horizon, and even if local governments had the budgets for upgrades, they wouldn’t want the standard products currently available. Now, Los Angeles County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the U.S., has hired IDEO, a design company with roots in Silicon Valley, to overhaul how it serves up democracy. IDEO has developed a touchscreen system that incorporates features familiar to voters used to scrolling and tapping. Election administrators across the country are closely watching the experiment. They want to know if L.A. can solve the problem of American voting. “For a long time people muttered that somebody should do something about this,” says Doug Chapin, who runs the University of Minnesota’s Program for Excellence in Election Administration. “What Los Angeles County is doing is just that.”
After the 2008 election drew record numbers to the polls, Dean Logan, L.A.’s top election official, decided it was time to replace the county’s obsolete machines, which are based on technology developed in the late 1960s. A nonprofit focused on helping disabled people vote connected him with IDEO, whose work includes creating Apple’s first mouse in 1980 and helping Bank of America use its website to encourage more savings in 2006. The county has signed two contracts with IDEO totaling $14.7 million. Logan has adopted IDEO’s philosophy and practices, such as keeping multicolored Post-it notes in his car for brainstorming sessions on the fly. “We wanted to focus on the voting experience,” he says. “We know if you have a bad experience the first time you vote, you have a lower chance of coming back.”
that certain parts of the ballot be in “heavy-faced Gothic capital type not smaller than 30-point” and that voting boxes be “at least three-eighths of an inch square.” The regulations are supposed to create fairness, but the results “aren’t necessarily very usable,” says Chapin. “Los Angeles completely flipped that on its head. For them the unit of analysis, the polestar, was the voter.”
Full Article: In Los Angeles, Voting Is Getting the Silicon Valley Treatment – Bloomberg Politics.