DR. TUNSTALL: I am Dori Tunstall, Director of Research for Design for
Democracy, a nonprofit organization. The Design for Democracy started in
2001. We engaged in research and design projects.

The first one about the wholistic voting experience which I will talk
more about. The second one is vote experience in the State of Oregon,
and lastly communicating to disenfranchised voters in the City of
Chicago. The project is national observation of the polling experience
this November. How much do I get to do?

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: You get to do your whole thing. If you run over,
I will give you a time stamp and questions from the panel, and we\'ll
move on.

DR. TUNSTALL: In terms of setting up the polling place and human factors
and privacy, the first thing to remember in the polling place is make
sure of that temporary environment.

Spaces designed for users other than voting, auditoriums, libraries,
churches, and my personal voting place is the restaurant.

Information for voters is often layered or tiered to their environment.
Instructions may be found on bulletin boards or other services often
competing for attention with other public announcements having nothing
to doing with election.

The physical structure of the polling place; tables, voting booths, and
ballot counting devices must compete with library tables, auditorium
seats, and cramped spaces of hallways converted for one-time use.

The voters experience is greatly affected by the visual and physical
confusion of the spaces. Voters maybe faced with confusing information,
queues, traffic flows, data set up.

People working at the polling place whose purpose and function is
unclear. Confusing information and difficult to navigate spaces erodes
voter confidence.

The voters may feel the confusion of the space suggests disorder behind
the scenes where votes are cast and counted. In 2001, Design for
Democracy did research and observation in five Cook County election
spaces.

The observations I\'m describing come directly out of those observations
and our synthesis of it. What we did with that information in terms of
how the poll worker affects the voting experience both as a gate keeper
and also the one who sets the environment.

It led to lots of design activities as well as design artifacts to help
both the poll workers in terms of adequately setting up the space
that\'s non-confusing as well as developing specific signage in the
polling space that is clear, bold enough, and distinguished enough from
other clutter that exists in the polling space that voters would get
accurate queues of where to go, how to find things, and what the role of
specific people are.

Based on this we realize design can help by, one, providing information
and training materials for poll workers that help them make decisions
about polling place set up and traffic flow.

That\'s developing informational and instructional signs and way finding
queys that can clearly stand out among the other possible informational
intrusions, and creating new structures designed for flexible adaptation
to unusual spaces and constraints of the polling place location.

In this packet, we have some artifacts of what we have done.

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: I know some of this material is on the web
address.

DR. TUNSTALL: You can also find information at WWD4D dot AIGA dot ORG,
O-R-G.

Just to sort of point out from the design perspective some things really
important is from experience again the user understanding where they
begin in the process.

How do they navigate through the space, the roles of the judges, and how
do the actual voting mechanisms function. We go further in terms of
where we start talking about polling place signage. Keeping the design
considerations that go with this. The multilingual aspects.

In Cook County, the two languages are Spanish and English. Part was
developing design requirements or guides for how do you treat a Spanish
person versus English in terms of, one, topography and in terms of size
and placement on the actual poster.

One really key thing we developed is color coding systems for
information that is instructional which was coded in red and then
information that is just informational like your voter bill of rights,
rules, and regulations.

So, it\'s using the tools of design to make it very clear to the voter
what they should focus on in the polling space as well as what
information is most important.

One of the key artifacts in terms of understanding the role of the
judges was designed \-- redesigned the election judge manual. One of the
things that we realized is by looking at the population of those who
tend to serve as.

They tend to be older, retired, and then having looked at the Cook
County election judge manual which was with very small type, and not
many pictures, and not very intuitive in terms of how you help set
things up.

We redesigned the entire document to make it easier, clearer to use,
tabs so it is set up to follow the actual day of the election poll
person so they don\'t have to look through the whole book.

They can reference what they need from \-- at 5:15 to 6:00 a.m. I need
to worry about this. Let me look at this section and figure out what I
need to do. Most importantly to make a lot of it graphical in terms of
images. Not photographic images but images illustrations that
communicate the most important aspect of what it is they are doing. The
setup of the table. The most important aspects to help the poll worker
to be able to do that.

And the other artifacts that we created and were around again was mostly
working with industrial design students, the space voting poll booths to
deal with the fact that the need for privacy but also the reality in
some cases voting is not an act of a single person, that other people
bring their husbands and their wives.

They actually stand together and confer about what the other person is
voting about. Mostly dealing with the complexity particularly in Chicago
with the amount of judges you have to vote for.

So, a lot of times what we found is that people will split up the
issues. You do research on these issues, you do research on these
issues, and the polling space is where they get together and confer
about what voting choices they should make.

While realizing the necessity of preserving privacy, there needs to be
accommodations for actual use of people voting together or conferring
with one another in the polling space, and we observe this.

Also we observed it with in the cases with the disabled and having
someone to assist them in their process, as well. In terms of thinking
about the booth and environment, one of the key issues is placement. And
the difficulty of this again is the placement of the booth in
relationship to each other to maintain privacy but also provide clear
navigation paths around it.

One of the complexities that we are dealing with when we do the November
the 3rd research is figure out what guidelines you can set in terms of
the use of the space. But within that context of the space. So, a long
hall as opposed to a square room, as opposed to sort of oblong shapes.

That\'s where we are hoping to do further work in that area.

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: You have an amazing body work. My first question
to you is obvious since we\'re tasked with creating a body of work of
many of these materials.

Have you boiled any of this down to sets of guidelines for yourself to
use in your own future work you might share with us?

DR. TUNSTALL: Again, we have a book coming out which is models for
improving the voting experience. It covers everything from envelope
systems to help the poll workers at the close of the election to put
together elections in order to understood what needs to go where,
signage, topography, design considerations. What color.

So for most \-- the only section I think is missing is the section on
specific guidelines for setting up the space because we need to do the
additional work on understanding the variety of spaces and how they
impact the traffic flow.

In all other aspects of the voting experience both from assisting the
poll worker, to assisting the Post Office, to assisting the actual user
through voter information, we have a book that\'s coming out that has
those.

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: Any questions?

MR. BURKHARDT: This is Craig Burkhardt. I have a practical question. If
an election authority wants to get itself involved with an organization
like yours, I assume with the level of work you are doing here, there
must have been a contractual basis. Is this typically a compensated
service that would be provided?

DR. TUNSTALL: The templates and the research we do we do through grant
funding. Then in terms of implementing them for a specific -- Cook
County, what we do is partner them up with a designer or if they need a
usability specialist or a research specialist.

Then they contract with those individuals to actually implement the
materials that we -- the nonprofit organization ourselves. We just
develop the templates and help them, consult only in helping them
identify people who can help them implement them.

MR. BURKHARDT: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: Jim.

MR. ELEKES: You are talking about access to the various square, long
halls, and such. Have you overlaid the U.S. Department of Justice
checklist for barrier free access in any of your work? I am curious if
you found it relevant.

DR. TUNSTALL: Yes. We have overlaid that work. The shortcomings \--
It\'s very comprehensive, I guess.

The shortcomings is not so much in the checklist itself. The area is
trying to figure out how to effectively communicate that to people. So,
what we would do with those things is provide more visual models or
examples to help people understand what this really is, and how you set
it up, and how you move things.

In terms of checklist, we think it\'s very good. It\'s just a matter of
help, communicating it in such a way to help people implement it.

MR. ELEKES: The other question is you have signage in both English and
Spanish. Have you looked at the development and placement of based upon
the ADA\'s disability guidelines and the placement of that signage, and
you identified any problems between English and Spanish and assuring
that it is in an accessible format?

DR. TUNSTALL: Well, the challenge that we have had is in the
implementation of it. We provided, for example, the guidelines to Cook
County, and the models, and the way in which they implemented it was not
up to what we consider our standards. Based on constraints.

And then when we went out in 2002 and took pictures of how they were
hung up, where they were placed, we found they were not placed in places
that we would indicate that would be most useful to the users.

MR. ELEKES: I am presuming from what I am hearing that the ADA
accessibility guidelines regarding the placement of signage in the
future at some point will be a consideration in conformity?

DR. TUNSTALL: Correct.

MR. ELEKES: Thank you.

CHAIRPERSON QUESENBERY: Is there anyone else on the phone besides Jim
and Dan? Okay. I want to make sure we are not cutting anyone off.