Tag: ballot
At Least 20 QAnon Republicans On Ballot For Congress And Top State Offices

At Least 20 QAnon Republicans On Ballot For Congress And Top State Offices

When Democratic now-President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election — defeating Republican then-President Donald Trump by more than seven million in the popular vote and picking up 306 electoral votes — critics of QAnon hoped that the far-right conspiracy movement would go away. But that didn’t happen. Just as Trump himself has maintained a level of influence that is unusual for ex-presidents, QAnon is still going strong almost 19 months into Biden’s presidency. Moreover, the extremist movement, according to New Republic reporter Melissa Gira Grant, is making a concerted effort to increase its influence via the 2022 midterms.

“A movement we were told would collapse without (Trump) has gone mainstream in Republican politics, and now boasts the support of more than 20 candidates running for federal or statewide office who will appear on the ballot this November,” Grant reports in an article published by The New Republic on August 18. “As many as 18 QAnon-supporting candidates for Congress will compete in November’s general election, with two QAnon-supporting gubernatorial candidates and two QAnon-supporting candidates for secretary of state, based on analyses from Grid and Media Matters. Including people who lost their primaries, QAnon candidates made the ballot in 26 states in the 2022 elections, and they have raised more than $20 million.”

To understand why Grant finds QAnon’s ongoing influence on the Republican Party so troubling, one needs to be familiar with some of the conspiracy theories that the cult has promoted. QAnon believes that the United States’ federal government has been hijacked by a sinister international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, satanists and cannibals and that Trump was elected president in 2016 in order to fight the cabal. Some conservative Republicans have had enough integrity to call out QAnon’s views as total nonsense, including Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. But many other Republicans have avoided criticizing QAnon, as they fear that doing so might offend Trump.


“Some of the names of QAnon-adjacent congressional candidates will be familiar, such as Republican incumbents Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, both considered long shots in 2020 whose first week in office included the January 6 assault on the Capitol by some of their own supporters, and who January 6 rally organizers allege met with them as part of their efforts to keep Trump in office — an allegation Boebert has denied,” Grant explains. “They are joined by newcomers like Republican Rep. Mayra Flores of Texas, who spread conspiracy theories that January 6 was ‘surely caused by infiltrators,’ and is currently serving in Congress after winning a special election this past spring.”

Grant continues, “There’s also Ohio Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski who was present at the Capitol on January 6 and boasted of helping get Trump supporters there, that has a chance at prevailing in a toss-up race. Like Greene and Boebert, Flores and Majewski are on record affirming support for QAnon — ‘I believe in everything that’s been put out from Q,’ Majewski said in 2021 — and both have tried to mislead reporters when questioned about their support for QAnon, denying or disavowing their past statements even as they still advance some core QAnon missions, such as casting doubt on the results of the 2020 election.”

QAnon have been major promotors of the Big Lie, the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud. And QAnon supporters were among the extremists who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. QAnon supporter Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon Shaman, is now serving a 41-month sentence in federal prison for his role in the attack on the Capitol Building.

“The dangers in this core belief in a stolen election becomes even more evident at the state-level, where QAnon-supporting candidates may be elected into positions with critical roles in the 2024 election, as part of a strategy led by QAnon influencers beginning in 2021,” Grant observes. “They have scored two supportive Republican candidates for governor, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Dan Cox in Maryland, and two for secretary of state, Republicans Jim Marchant in Nevada and Mark Finchem in Arizona. Mastriano and Cox both attended a QAnon conference in April 2022, ‘Patriots Arise,’ at which the opening speaker claimed that ‘child satanic trafficking’ existed and that he would ‘not stop until these people’ — the alleged traffickers — ‘are dead and in boxes in the ground.’ After Mastriano pitched himself to the crowd as the one who God would help win — and that what he would do to the state of Pennsylvania would make Florida look like ‘amateur hour’ — organizers presented him with a sword to ‘bless him.’”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.

The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.

Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

We’ve made some progress since then, but we still likely lose hundreds of thousands of votes every election year due to poor ballot design and instructions. In 2008 and 2010 alone, almost half a million people did not have their votes counted due to mistakes filling out the ballot. Bad ballot design also contributes to long lines on election day. And the effects are not the same for all people: the disenfranchised are disproportionately poor, minority, elderly and disabled.

In the predominantly African American city of East St. Louis, the race for United States senator in 2008 was missing a header that specified the type or level of government (Federal, Congressional, Legislative, etc). Almost 10 percent of East St. Louis voters did not have their vote counted for U.S. Senate, compared to the state average of 4.4 percent.Merely adding a header could have solved the problem. Below you can see the original ballot and the Brennan Center redesign.

“When we design things in a way that doesn’t work for all voters, we degrade the quality of democracy,” said Whitney Quesenbery, a ballot expert and co-director of the Center for Civic Design, an organization that uses design to ensure voters vote the way they want to on Election Day.

Many mistakes can be avoided with tiny tweaks.

Designer Marcia Lausen, who directs the School of Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote a whole book about how democracy can be improved with design. She even tackles the infamous butterfly ballot. The 2000 Chicago Cook County judicial retention ballot crammed 73 candidates into 10 pages of a butterfly layout punch card ballot, with punch holes packed much more tightly together than in previous elections. As in Palm Beach, Yes/No votes for the candidates on the left page were confusingly interlaced with Yes/No votes for the right page.

Lausen’s proposed redesign eliminates the interlaced Yes/No votes, introduces a more legible typeface, uses shading and outlines to connect names and Yes/No’s with the appropriate punch holes, and removes redundant language.

BEFORE

AFTER

In the 2002 midterm election in Illinois’ Hamilton County, each column of candidate names was next to a series of incomplete arrows. Voters were supposed to indicate their choice of candidate by completing the arrow on the left of the candidate name. But because we read left to right and the candidate names in two races lined up perfectly, many voters marked the arrow to the right. As presented in a Brennan Center analysis, setting the columns a bit further apart and adding borders would have cleared up this confusion:

                       BEFORE                                                                        AFTER

In Minnesota in 2008, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for the U.S. Senate seat by a sliver, less than 300 votes. In that race, almost 4,000 absentee ballots were not counted because the envelope was not signed. The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office decided to redesign the mailing envelope. After a series of usability tests, they added a big X to mark where people should sign. In the following election in 2010, the rate of missing signatures dropped to 837. Below is the before and after from a Brennan Center report:

Minnesota’s mailing envelope is a good example of how designers can solve design problems well before any election actually happens — by testing those ballots beforehand.

“Test and test and test,” recommends Don Norman, a designer and cognitive scientist who wrote the the book on designing objects for everyday life. The most important aspect of ballot design, he says, is considering the needs of the voters. He suggests doing extensive testing of ballots on a sample of people, which should include those who are “blind, deaf, or people with physical disabilities as well as people with language difficulties.”

Bad instructions are a design problem, too.

Beyond layout and ordering, the unanimous winner for worst part of ballot design? Instructions.

“The instructions are uniformly horrible!” said usability expert Dana Chisnell, who co-directs the Center for Civic Design with Quesenbery. Confusing jargon, run-on sentences, old-fashioned language left over from 100 years ago: all of these plague ballots across the country. Here are a few example instructions (the first from Kansas, the second from Ohio) along with the Brennan Center’s redesign:

BEFORE

AFTER

(Brennan Center, Better Ballots)

BEFORE

AFTER

Even if the instructions are clear, placement of instructions has a huge effect on whether people understand them. In usability tests conducted in Florida’s Sarasota and Duval counties in 2008, the majority of participants got to the end of the ballot and stopped. Which was a problem, because the ballot continued on the other side. Despite instructions specifically telling people to vote both sides of the ballot, they didn’t.

So designers added three words to the end of the right column: Turn Ballot Over. The result? An estimated 28,000 fewer lost votes in the two counties that adopted the redesign. Here’s the before and after:

Designers have already put together guidelines for making better ballots.

Luckily, there are resources for how to help avoid these predictable problems. In addition to Lausen’s book, the Design for Democracy initiative has worked for years at applying design principles to improve elections. A few years ago the design association AIGAcombined forces with Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell to condense their best practices into a set of handy field guides.

The ballot-specific guide, Designing Usable Ballots, has this advice:

  1. Use lowercase letters.
  2. Avoid centered type.
  3. Use big enough type.
  4. Pick one sans-serif font.
  5. Support process and navigation.
  6. Use clear, simple language.
  7. Use accurate instructional illustrations.
  8. Use informational icons (only).
  9. Use contrast and color to support meaning.
  10. Show what’s most important.

For the designers, these recommendations may seem obvious. But election officials — the ones responsible for laying out a ballot — are not designers.

Sometimes, reality thwarts good design.

Even if officials wanted to follow every design best practice, they probably wouldn’t be able to.

That’s because ballots are as complicated as the elections they represent. Elections in the U.S. are determined at the local level, and so each ballot must be uniquely crafted to its own jurisdiction. Ballots must combine federal, state, and local contests, display measures and propositions, and sometime require voters to express their choices in various formats — for example ranking their choices versus selecting one candidate for the job.

“There will always be special circumstances that present new problems for ballot design,” said David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has written extensively on voting behavior and ballot design.

Take what happened this summer in California’s Senate race primary. A record number of 34 candidates were running to replace incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer, and the ballot needed to fit them all. In many counties, elections officials simply couldn’t follow the good design recommendation of “Put all candidate names in one column.”

To make matters worse, bad design is written right into the law.

Election officials are often constricted in what they can and can’t do by specific language in their local election code. More often than not, the law is to blame for bad design.

For example, numerous jurisdictions require that candidate names and titles be written in capital letters. This goes against huge amounts of evidence that lowercase letters are easier to read. Other requirements like setting a specific font size, making sections bold or center-aligning headers make it next to impossible to follow all the design best practices. Illinois Election Code used to require candidate names to be printed in capital letters. (Statutes of the State of Illinois)

Some election code requirements just seem to invite clutter. In Kansas, a candidate’s hometown must be listed under their name. In California, the candidate’s occupation. Designers argue that this additional text complicates the ballot with needless information, but they can’t get rid of it without breaking the law.

“It’s amazing how many design prescriptions are written into law by non-designers,” said designer Drew Davies, who has worked with numerous jurisdictions to improve their ballots and voting materials and is design director of AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Some of those prescriptions border on the comical. In New York, election law requiresthat each candidate name must be preceded by “the image of a closed fist with index finger extended pointing to the party or independent row.” Here’s how that actually looks on real New York ballots:

In design, everything matters — even the order of the candidate names.

Some design problems are not as obvious as a pointing finger. Take something as simple as the order of the candidates’ names. There is a well known advantage for being listed first on the ballot. The “primacy effect” can significantly sway elections, especially in smaller races not widely covered in the media where there is no incumbent. One study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York found that in seven races the advantage from being listed first was bigger than the margin of victory. In other words, if the runner-up candidates in those races had been listed first on the ballot, they likely would have won.

As one report puts it, “a non-negligible portion of local governmental policies are likely being set by individuals elected only because of their ballot position.” To combat this unconscious bias, some states have already mandated that names are randomly ordered on the ballot. Still, many states and jurisdictions do not have a standard system for organizing these names.

The future will bring new design challenges… but also new ways to make voting more accessible.

As more and more states adopt absentee and vote-by-mail systems, they make voting more accessible and convenient — but they also introduce new ways of making mistakes. And those errors are only caught after the ballot has been mailed in, too late to change. A polling place acts as a fail-safe, giving you the opportunity to ask a poll worker for help or letting you fill out a new ballot if yours gets rejected by the voting machine. But on an absentee ballot, if you made a mistake and your vote isn’t counted, you’ll never know.

There are several current efforts to overhaul the ballot entirely. Los Angeles County, for example, has teamed up with the design company IDEO to create an easier and more accessible way to vote. Their customizable device would let people fill out a sample ballot on their own time from a computer or mobile device, and then scan a code at the polling place to automatically transfer their choices to a real ballot.

The Anywhere Ballot is another open-source project that’s designed to create a better voting experience for everyone — including voters with low literacy or mild cognitive issues. Their digital ballot template, which came out of extensive user testing and follows all the current ballot design best practices, lets anyone use their own electronic device to mark a ballot.

But of course, the design problems that plague ballots affect all aspects of the voting process.

Voter registration materials, mailed voter guides and education booklets, election department websites and online instructions, poll worker materials — all of these have problems that can be improved with better design.

“Ballots are where all the drama happens,” said designer Lausen, “but there is much more to election design.”

Cover Photo: (AP Photo/Gary I. Rothstein)

Some Voters In Chicago Wait 9 Hours To Vote: ‘I Just Didn’t Want To Be Denied’

Some Voters In Chicago Wait 9 Hours To Vote: ‘I Just Didn’t Want To Be Denied’

By Quinn Ford, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — The speeches were long over and most of the races had been called, but Decorda McGee still waited in line at a Chicago polling place to cast his ballot.

After nine hours, McGee finally voted around 3 a.m. Wednesday, the last person in a long, slow line of people who took advantage of same-day registration voting.

“I just didn’t want to be denied,” McGee said after walking out of his North Side polling place. “I wasn’t going to be denied my right to vote, and that was the sentiment of everybody in there.”

Under a law signed this past summer, people were allowed to both register and vote on Election Day at designated polling places throughout the state.

People who had not registered to vote but had lived in their precincts for at least 30 days before the election could bring two forms of identification, one of which included a current address. The ballots will be considered “provisional” and set aside from the regular vote count until the registration information provided by the new voter could be authenticated.

But same-day registration was not available at every polling place, which led to confusion for some voters. In suburban Cook County, there were fewer than two dozen same-day registration locations. Election authorities in each county posted same-day registration locations on their websites.

Chicago had five designated sites across the city for those who wanted to register and vote on the same day, but long lines and problems with voting equipment meant some, like McGee, had to wait for hours.

By the time McGee voted, virtually all the races had been decided. In the hotly contested gubernatorial race, Bruce Rauner claimed victory before midnight but Gov. Pat Quinn said he would wait until every vote was counted.
McGee, a Democrat, said Quinn’s refusal to concede “really pumped me to stay.”

“He’s not giving up, we’re not giving up,” McGee said. “It was really important.”

Jennifer Omoregie, 29, was also one of the last to cast her vote. She said she was frustrated as the results of races come in while she was still in line. But she too refused to leave.

“It’s my right. If I’m here at 3 a.m., you still have to let me vote even though it’s Nov. 5 because I was here before 7,” she said.

Omoregie blamed mismanagement and a lack of polling equipment and volunteers for the long line. She saw at least 100 people leave without voting, she said.

“It was a zoo. They didn’t manage it at all,” she said. “It was completely ridiculous.”

As the end of the line cast their ballots, fellow voters and election judges cheered and applauded.

Sara Waller, 23, said the morale of the weary voters was boosted throughout the evening by well-wishers. At one point, an election judge from the suburbs stopped by to give Waller and others snacks after seeing the long lines on the news, Waller said.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel also showed up to distribute pizza, Omoregie and Waller said.

“Everytime I was getting ready to throw in the towel, something made me stay a little bit longer,” Waller said. “Once you reach a certain point in line, you can’t really leave.”

At the Chicago and Cook County election headquarters downtown, there was more than an hour wait at 10 a.m., with more than 100 people in a line snaking through the basement, waiting for the chance to register and vote.

At the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, dozens of residents lined up early Tuesday to register, change their addresses and vote.

Although it was a lengthy, five-step process just to get to the voting booth, residents waited.

It took Twyla Speed, 38, nearly two hours to cast a ballot, she said. A new resident of Bronzeville, she said she reported to her local polling place at 6:30 a.m. and was told she wasn’t registered and had to then travel to the King Center to start over.

“I’m really disappointed,” Speed said. “I purchased my home in May. When I went to the department of motor vehicles, I had my address and everything switched over. Then this morning, I’m not registered. How did this happen? No one is sure. I just hope this isn’t another way to manipulate voters.”

With a stack of mail in hand and several forms of identification, Speed tolerated the long line. But she wasn’t certain many people would be as determined as she was Tuesday.

“I thought this was taken care of. Then my registration isn’t in the system. I can’t help but wonder: Did somebody drop the ball?”

Photo via Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr

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Obama Votes Early In Chicago

Obama Votes Early In Chicago

Chicago — President Barack Obama cast his ballot Monday during a visit in his hometown of Chicago two weeks ahead of November 4 midterm elections.

“I love voting. Everybody in Illinois, early vote. It’s a wonderful opportunity,” Obama said after submitting his vote at the Martin Luther King Jr Park & Family Entertainment Center.

“The way we win any election is making sure we turn out.”

Obama brought donuts and other pastries to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn’s office and worked his way around the room.

“Michelle sent these. We got broccoli, carrots,” Obama joked about the pastries, in reference to his wife’s health and nutrition campaign.

During a rally supporting Quinn’s re-election campaign on Sunday, Obama had urged Democrats to turn out in large numbers to offset the Republicans’ usually higher turnout.

“You’ve got to grab your friends. You’ve got to grab your coworkers. Don’t just get the folks who you know are going to vote,” he said.

During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Obama had also voted early, which is unusual for a serving president.

Early voting, which is subject to different laws in the 50 US states, aims to avoid long waits at polling stations on voting day.

It also encourages voters to participate in the balloting without having to take time off work.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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