Louisiana has unveiled its newest "I Voted" sticker design, titled "Louisiana State of Mind."
FILE - People vote on Election Day at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Charter School in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Nov. 8, 2016. The need for Louisiana to replace its voting machines is not in dispute. They were deployed in 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina struck, and don’t produce paper ballots that are critical to ensuring election results are accurate. What to do about them is another story. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
Louisiana has unveiled its newest "I Voted" sticker design, titled "Louisiana State of Mind."
FILE - People vote on Election Day at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Charter School in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Nov. 8, 2016. The need for Louisiana to replace its voting machines is not in dispute. They were deployed in 2006, the year after Hurricane Katrina struck, and don’t produce paper ballots that are critical to ensuring election results are accurate. What to do about them is another story. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
Editor's note: This story, written by Aliyya Swaby and Annie Waldman, was originally published by ProPublica and co-published by Gray TV/Investigate TV. The story is part of the SoJo Exchange from the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. Each week, Louisiana Inspired will feature one Solutions Journalism story providing tangible evidence that positive change is actually happening right now, in our own communities and around the world.
Faye Combs used to enter the voting booth with trepidation. Unable to read until she was in her 40s, she would struggle to decipher the words on the ballot, intimidated by how quickly the people around her finished and departed.
“When the election was over, I didn’t even realize what I had voted for because it was just so much reading,” she said.
Combs’ feelings of insecurity and disorientation when faced with a ballot are not unusual. Voters with low literacy skills are more likely to take what they read literally and act on each word, sometimes without considering context, literacy experts say. Distractions can more easily derail them, causing them to stop reading too soon.
“I’ve seen people try to read (the ballot) left to right and end up skipping entire contests,” said Kathryn Summers, a University of Baltimore professor who has spent decades studying how information can be made more accessible.
She has found that voters who struggle to read are also more likely to make mistakes on their registration applications, such as writing their birth date incorrectly or forgetting to fill in the check box that indicates they are a citizen, either of which could lead to their vote being rejected.
As a ProPublica investigation found, today’s election system remains a modern-day literacy test — a convoluted obstacle course for people who struggle to read. Though many people may require assistance with registration or at the ballot box, some counties and states have made it more challenging to secure help.
Experts say redesigning both the registration and election processes to be more accessible will allow more people to vote without assistance and participate more robustly in democracy. Ballots and forms should be simply written and logically laid out; jargon should be stripped from instructions and ballot amendments; and, if possible, new forms should be tested on a diverse group of constituents.
Such reforms can be expensive and time-consuming, which stops some states and municipalities from taking on the task, said Dana Chisnell, who co-founded the nonprofit Center for Civic Design to help states and counties develop accessible voter materials.
“They may have old voting systems that they’re holding together with duct tape and baling twine because they can’t afford to replace them or there were other priorities in the county,” she said.
But numerous examples show that when such changes are made, more votes get counted. “If we make it better for people with low literacy, it will actually be better for everyone,” Summers said.
As ProPublica has written, bad ballot design can sabotage up to hundreds of thousands of votes each election year.
After the confusing butterfly ballot infamously wreaked havoc in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, the federal government increased its oversight and regulation of local election administration, including by issuing voluntary guidelines for how ballots and election materials should look. But states and counties continue to wind up with miscast or uncast votes as a result of design failures.
In 2018, for example, Florida’s Broward County used a ballot on which the names of Senate candidates were listed at the bottom of a column, under a long list of instructions.
In advance of the 2014 election, Florida’s Escambia County redesigned its absentee ballot forms to format instructions as a checklist on the outside of the envelope, add simple illustrations and place a colored highlight over the spot where voters were supposed to sign.
Many states, including Florida, require absentee ballots to be rejected if a signature is missing or doesn’t match other records. The new design’s emphasis on providing a signature reduced the share of ballots that were missing a signature by 42% between 2014 and 2016, and reduced by 53% the share of ballots that were rejected even after voters were offered a chance to add their signatures.
The United States has some of the lowest voter registration and turnout rates among its international peers. It also stands out for its relatively burdensome voting process. Many experts believe these two things are related.
Other industrialized countries with comparable or even lower literacy rates than the United States tend to have higher levels of voter turnout.
One simple reason for their increased participation is that they make it easier to vote. Most of them have some form of compulsory or automatic voter registration in place, according to research from the Pew Research Center and the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network.
Countries allow citizens to vote without having to actively sign up beforehand, or they automatically register citizens who interact with government organizations, like motor vehicle departments or social service agencies. Other countries, like Australia, have gone further and made voting mandatory, and citizens who do not cast ballots may be subject to penalties.
In nations with automatic registration programs in place, the percentage of people who are signed up to vote is substantially higher than in the United States, where only 67% of the voting-age population is registered.
By comparison, in Canada, 93% of the voting-age population is registered to vote, and similarly, that number is 94% in Sweden and 99% in Slovakia, according to Pew. In the United Kingdom, where government officials seek out voters every year through nationwide canvassing, the registration rate is 92%.
Barry Burden, a professor and the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that in the United States, the registration step “is probably more of a deterrent to voter participation than we realize,” he said.
“It’s a little challenging for most voters, but if a person doesn’t have the literacy skills or language skills to navigate that bureaucratic process, it could be a deterrent to even getting registered or getting a ballot in the first place,” Burden said.
The United States is starting to shift its registration policies. Some states have initiated automatic voter registration programs, which use information from other government agencies to complete registration electronically unless people opt out.
Since 2015, at least 15 states and Washington, D.C., have launched automatic registration programs, and the effect has been extraordinary: With new systems in place, registrations increased by 16% in Oregon, 27% in California and 94% in Georgia.
Allowing people to register on the same day they vote could increase participation, too. Voters who made errors earlier in the process would have another opportunity to register or fill out their ballots alongside election officials who could ensure their accuracy. As of 2012, states with same-day registration had, on average, 10% higher turnout than states without, according to the Center for American Progress.
Combs, who is now 78, no longer feels intimidated in the voting booth. She understands that there are many people like her, who have figured out ways to navigate the world without being able to read well enough to handle routine civic duties like voting.
At the age of 7, Combs was sexually abused by a stranger, a trauma that shadowed her childhood, she said, making it harder for her to remember the lessons she had learned in school. She pressured classmates for the answers to homework and exams, and her teachers passed her on from grade to grade.
When she graduated from high school in Bakersfield, California, she said, she left with the secret that she couldn’t read. She was too ashamed to tell her husband until seven years into their marriage. She often brought him into the polling booth because she didn’t even know where to sign her name on the election forms.
Working as a manager of Berkeley’s Meals on Wheels program, Combs thought she was hiding her inability to read from her co-workers — until one day, her secretary left a flyer on her desk about a local literacy program. She began learning with a tutor, strengthening both her ability to read and her desire to be more politically engaged. Since then, Combs has made it her mission to empower people to learn how to read and participate in democracy.
She now works with the Key to Community Project, which guides struggling readers through the voting process, helping them develop skills to research candidates and understand how elections work.
The nonpartisan project, led by people who learned to read as adults, is an extension of California Library Literacy Services, the country’s first statewide library-based literacy program.
Literacy advocates argue that states should contribute more to adult education to increase workforce skills and democratic participation. Combs counsels participants in the California program not to worry about taking as much time as they need to understand the ballot.
“I know what the shame is, but you have to move beyond that shame,” Combs said. “That attitude about ‘My vote doesn’t count’ needs to be banished.”
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