In summer 2020, I had a short-term contract to “design” primary and general election ballots. In practice, it was one of the most mind-numbingly dull gigs I’ve had. Thanks to how poor ballot design would alter the course of history, it was a reliable icebreaker for years.1
Format, really, not design. The statehouse determined that. I just poured text. I couldn’t even adjust the kerning on a name like EMERSON LAKE PALMER CROSBY-STILLS to fit suitably into the same column as AL GREEN2, or break it into 2 lines, without statehouse approval. Massachusetts was, even then, careful to not influence the voter through ballot format.
Most of the ballots were formatted in the then trending QuarkXpress. A few – for voting machines that still used Actual Levers – were still in PageMaker. They obliged a non-standard, very wide printout. The required printer was presumably manacled by a baroque arrangement of corner cutting service plans into using the older app on the older machine. I probably got the gig because I admitted to knowing PageMaker.
A work day could be running PageMaker on the PC until it crashed. Then shifting back to Quark on a Mac until the PC was back up. I’d use the down time to mark up formatting options for the latest batch of statehouse approvals. Rinse. Repeat.
The returning temporary managers of the ballot project were home-schooling religious zealots from out of state. They were overtly judgmental of pretty much everyone in the building, except for me. Well, maybe. I’m related to enough of their ilk, that I often revert to a necessary obliviousness to such things. They were excited to merely have a coworker willing to say Boo to them.
Speaking of Boo…
That summer, I was also the artistic director of a charity haunted house. I had just started the ballot gig. When we brainstormed for themes, I was all-in on Monster CamPAIN 2000. I’m still proud of how clever and awesome we were. Many political jokes translated into something as scary for the kids as it would be for the adults. Dead rose from their graves to vote. Vampire bats watched election returns upside down. I forget how exactly we worked in the obligatory chainsaw guy. Still not as scary as the months that followed the election. Which compared to, say, the one we’re bracing for now, just seems so quaint. Our theme of “Nothing is scarier than politics” has continued to be all too true.
But, at the time, it was exciting enough that I was officially presented as a 2020 Ballot Designer during a session of the NYS Assembly. This happened while visiting a relative who was working for but not yet themselves an elected politician. They are now, and… let’s just say our viewpoints differ.
However, I suspect both of us agree that you should vote.
- Folks would ask if I designed Florida ballots (no), or any “Butterfly” ballots (no again, there were only four precincts in my state that still used any sort of punchcard, “chad”-producing ballot). ↩︎
- Hopefully it’s obvious that these are not the real names, which I’ve long forgotten. I remember one was very short, and the other had at least 2 middle names and a hyphenated last name. ↩︎