Every U.S. presidential election since 2000 has had over 50% voter turnout. In contrast, America’s municipal elections typically see between 20-27% of eligible voters cast a ballot. This percentage has been in decline over the past 20 years, suggesting that an unprecedented number of Americans are disconnected from their city government or municipal voting processes.
Boston is no exception. Every four years, mayoral elections have anywhere from 28-38% voter turnout. City council elections fare even worse and typically see an abysmal 13-18% turnout.
Our team of students in DPI-663, a Harvard Kennedy School field class on Technology and Innovation in Government, is working with the City of Boston’s Elections Commission and the Department of Innovation and Technology to tackle low voter-turnout. Our goal is to develop policy recommendations and product prototypes that Boston can implement to improve turnout in future municipal elections. We’ll be conducting user research, developing prototypes, and testing them on Boston voters. We’re writing about this journey in a series of posts:
Part 1: We spoke with Boston residents to understand their reasons for voting or not voting.
Part 2: We interviewed voters on Super Tuesday and dug into Boston’s voter turnout data.
The primary take-away from our research is that there are five main factors which determine whether a resident of Boston will vote in a municipal election:
A screenshot from a presentation we delivered to our partners at the City of Boston
Now that we better understand the problem of low voter turnout in Boston, we turn to a more daunting task: figuring out how to tackle it.
Brainstorming
Our first step was exploring existing literature and case studies about increasing turnout in municipal elections. We read about interesting solutions proposed by and implemented in other cities with lower voter turnout: moving the election date to coincide with federal or state elections, offering free transportation on election day, encouraging community centers to host “Get to Know Your Ballot” events, giving out “Good Neighbors Vote” lawn signs, and more.
We also met with Dana Chisnell, a co-founder of the Center for Civic Design—and, luckily for us, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School! She pointed us to some helpful resources developed by the Center, such as templates for voter guides and vote-at-home envelopes.
Drawing inspiration from our research and the meeting with Dana, we brainstormed as many solutions as possible for low turnout in Boston’s municipal elections with the help of sticky notes, colourful markers, and a giant whiteboard. We focused on developing solutions that would target at least one of the five factors influencing voter turnout, which we had discovered by interviewing Boston residents.
Team members Paul, Sunaina, Molly, and Dasha brainstorm solutions
Narrowing down our ideas
After the brainstorming exercise, we had around 50 ideas about how to improve voter turnout in Boston. We went through several methods of narrowing down this list of solutions.
First, we typed up our ideas from the brainstorming exercise and voted on our favorites. We used an emoji system to represent first, second, and third choice votes and a corresponding number of points.
An excerpt from our preliminary brainstorming document, including our “votes” cast
Next, we presented the solutions with the highest point totals to our partners at the City of Boston. We ruled out solutions deemed infeasible, largely because of legal reasons (for example, we learned that the City can’t provide information about candidates on their website or social media, which was one of our suggestions) or uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic (a number of our ideas targeted young people since they have the lowest turnout rates, but our partners at the City pointed out that since students aren’t currently on campus and college administrators are preoccupied with planning around COVID-19, student-focused solutions might not be feasible in the short run).
An excerpt from our list of top ideas. Our comments indicate feedback from partners at the City of Boston.
At this point, we had narrowed down our initial list of 50 solutions to 15. Our final step was to develop a set of criteria so we could systematically evaluate the remaining solutions.
Our evaluation criteria
Finally, after much discussion, we were left with three ideas to prototype and test:
An expansion of vote-by-mail, which we considered particularly urgent given COVID-19 and, more generally, would make voting more convenient;
A mailer to serve as a behavioural nudge; and
Text message reminders to vote to raise awareness and boost interest in the election.
Prototyping
After we narrowed down the list of solutions, we started illustrating potential implementations. Our rough sketches are examples of low-fidelity prototypes, which are simple visual representations of a product with limited resemblance to the final design. This article captures why low-fidelity prototypes are so useful: they’re a “quick and easy way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts.”
Here’s what we came up with:
This is a prototype for the behavioral nudge mailer where (1) is the back of the mailer and the front of the mailer is either (2) for frequent voters or (3) for nonvoters. In designing the mailer prototype, we applied three main take-ways from our research on effective get-out-the-vote strategies:
Provide voting information: We do this on the back of the mailer (image 1) by including the election date and the recipient’s poll location.
Help voters make a plan: We included a URL and a QR code which would link to a page on the City of Boston website where residents can plan their trip to the poll. We still have to discuss the webpage idea with our partners at the City. If we decide to proceed with further prototyping, it’s going to be important to test the “make a plan” feature: will Bostonians actually use the QR code or type the provided URL into their phone or computer?
Use messages that exert a degree of social pressure: The three most common types of social pressure tactics we found were showing residents their past voting history, thanking people for voting in previous elections, and emphasizing that other people in the community are voting (multiple studies suggest that everyone-is-doing-it messaging is more effective at increasing turnout than don’t-be-part-of-the-problem rhetoric). We applied all three of these tactics in our prototype.
This is a three-part prototype for revamping the vote-by-mail system in Boston. We sketched a notification mailer to residents letting them know that they can vote by email, a pre-stamped and addressed envelope, and updated information on the boston.gov website. Our next steps are to flush out the content of the mailer and figure out how to make it multilingual.
Lastly, this is a prototype for text message reminders. From top left to bottom right, we sketched: (1) the alert, (2) the text sent 1 week before Election Day (3) the text sent 5 days before Election Day, (4) the text sent 3 days before Election Day, and (5) the text sent on Election Day.
We thought that Boston residents would be more likely to read SMS reminders than emails (or even mailers!) as they are more personalized and easily accessible. We designed the reminders to address challenges we had discovered when speaking with Bostonians, such as not knowing when the municipal elections are, where their polling station is, etc. However, residents would have to opt-in to receive SMS updates, so the overall reach of this solution may be limited.
Next steps
Over the coming weeks, our plan is to work with Boston residents to understand their perceptions and reactions to these prototypes. We’ll inevitably have many iterations of testing and editing according to their feedback before we’re ready to create a high-fidelity product for the City. We’re excited about where this process will take us!
Joanna Bell, Dasha Metropolitansky, Sunaina Pumadarthy, Paul Rosenboom, Molly Welch