Voting Machines and the Online Copywriter

Memo to election officials across the US: Please let online copywriters and designers create a simple to use, friction-free electronic ballot.

We got to thinking about this because, once again, Florida is in the news for bungling an election. This time, 10,000 votes weren’t counted in an election decided by a margin of 369. The reason? The ballot was confusing and apparently a high margin of voters skipped the contest in question.

Good grief.

Online copywriters and designers are well-versed in the tradecraft of creaing registration paths, sign-ups, polls, eCommerce and all manner of interactive content. Not too hard to imagine that any competant design shop could create, test and polish a friction-free ballot with very low user drop-off. Naturally, the language would be beaten into shape by a qualified online copywriter (don’t you designers even think of horning in on our patch).

Other issues most certainly surround electronic voting - security, paper printouts - even a national standard is uncertain.

Yes, our taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

But it’s 2007. We have the technology to address all of the above concerns.

So, dear election officials: outsource it. Hire Hewlett Packard, NCR and Online Copywriter (or anybody else you like as long as they are not related or a love interest). Hire Google or Paypal or eBay or Amazon. Hire Online Copywriter (did we mention that already?).

Creating an effective national electronic ballot is well-within our scope of knowledge as a nation and long overdue.