Democracy is inspiring, the way we design it not so much. I discovered that again this afternoon when I voted in the D.C. Democratic presidential primary. For example, here’s the entrance of my polling place. Duct tape keeping up the main sign. The official placard resting on the ground. Nice. The whole aesthetic has a certain Soviet Union circa. 1983 despair to it, don’t you think?
Then inside, the first poster I see is this — which explains that the following candidates, whose names appear on the ballot, have actually dropped out of the race. 
I’m not sure why, especially in a jurisdiction as small as ours, ballot production can’t occur a little closer to Election Day. What’s worse, the outdated ballots stoke my deepest fear: that I will accidentally cast a vote for Dennis Kucinich.
I give my name to the clerk and she hands me a blue ticket, which I’m directed to give to another clerk. I ask clerk 2 if I could use one of the two nifty new touch-screen ballot machines. She advises me not to. They’re not working very well today, she explains. Upon hearing that, I glance over and see an elderly clerk peering into the optical scanner thingamajig and clopping the side of the nifty new machine with her hand. Not a good sign. So I take a paper ballot, which looks like this:
Not awful. Better than the butterfly ballot. But why all the concern over red ink? Does that mean blue ink is OK? I thought it said only Number Two pencils. Oh, crap. I got distracted. Almost marked the Kucinich line. Time to make my choice. I’ll leave it to you, Dear Reader, to guess who I voted for. But let’s be honest: There’s no way an Apple Store or Starbucks would ever get away with treating its “guests” with such indifference. People would complain. Shouldn’t this ritual we call voting — one of the few sacred acts in our secular society — command the same attention to clarity, simplicity, and even beauty?
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