The Voter Experience

Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.

Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?

In software development, the concept of user experience (UX) is fundamental to the design of any product or service. It’s a way to think holistically about how a user interacts with technology. It ensures that products and services are built with the users’ actual needs, behaviors, and expectations in mind, as opposed to what developers think users want. UX enables informed decisions based on how the user will interact with the system, leading to improved design, more effective solutions, and increased user satisfaction. Good UX design results in easy, relevant, useful, positive experiences. Bad UX design leads to unhappy users.

This is not how we normally think of elections. Campaigns measure success through short-term outputs—voter contacts, fundraising totals, issue polls, ad impressions—and, ultimately, election results. Rarely do they evaluate how individuals experience this as a singular, messy, democratic process. Each campaign, PAC, nonprofit, and volunteer group may be focused on their own goal, but the voter experiences it all at once. By the time they’re in line to vote, they’ve been hit with a flood of outreach—spammy texts from unfamiliar candidates, organizers with no local ties, clunky voter registration sites, conflicting information, and confusing messages, even from campaigns they support. Political teams can point to data that justifies this barrage, but the effectiveness of voter contact has been steadily declining since 2008. Intuitively, we know this approach has long-term costs. To address this, let’s evaluate the UX of an election cycle from the point of view of the end user, the everyday citizen.

Specifically, how might we define the UX of an election cycle: the voter experience (VX)? A VX lens could help us see the full impact of the electoral cycle from the perspective that matters most: the voters’.

For example, what if we thought about elections in terms of questions like these?

How do voters experience an election cycle, from start to finish?
How do voters perceive their interactions with political campaigns?
What aspects of the election cycle do voters enjoy? What do they dislike? Do citizens currently feel fulfilled by voting?
If voters “tune out” of politics, what part of the process has made them want to not pay attention?
What experiences decrease the number of eligible citizens who register and vote?
Are we able to measure the cumulative impacts of political content interactions over the course of multiple election cycles?
Can polls or focus groups help researchers learn about longitudinal sentiment from citizens as they experience multiple election cycles?
If so, what would we want to learn in order to bolster democratic participation and trust in institutions?

Thinking in terms of VX can help answer these questions. Moreover, researching and designing around VX could help identify additional metrics, beyond traditional turnout and engagement numbers, that better reflect the collective impact of campaigning: of all those voter contact and persuasion efforts combined.

This isn’t a radically new idea, and earlier efforts to embed UX design into electoral work yielded promising early benefits. In 2020, a coalition of political tech builders created a Volunteer Experience program. The group held design sprints for political tech tools, such as canvassing apps and phone banking sites. Their goal was to apply UX principles to improve the volunteer user flow, enhance data hygiene, and improve volunteer retention. If a few sprints can improve the phone banking experience, imagine the transformative possibilities of taking this lens to the VX as a whole.

If we want democracy to thrive long-term, we need to think beyond short-term wins and table stakes. This isn’t about replacing grassroots organizing or civic action with digital tools. Rather, it’s about learning from UX research methodology to build lasting, meaningful engagement that involves both technology and community organizing. Often, it is indeed local, on-the-ground organizers who have been sounding the alarm about the long-term effects of prioritizing short-term tactics. A VX approach may provide additional data to bolster their arguments.

Learnings from a VX analysis of election cycles could also guide the design of new programs that not only mobilize voters (to contribute, to campaign for their candidates, and to vote), but also ensure that the entire process of voting, post-election follow-up, and broader civic participation is as accessible, intuitive, and fulfilling as possible. Better voter UX will lead to more politically engaged citizens and higher voter turnout.

VX methodology may help combine real-time citizen feedback with centralized decision-making. Moving beyond election cycles, focusing on the citizen UX could accelerate possibilities for citizens to provide real-time feedback, review the performance of elected officials and government, and receive help-desk-style support with the same level of ease as other everyday “products.” By understanding how people engage with civic life over time, we can better design systems for citizens that strengthen participation, trust, and accountability at every level.

Our hope is that this approach, and the new data and metrics uncovered by it, will support shifts that help restore civic participation and strengthen trust in institutions. With citizens oriented as the central users of our democratic systems, we can build new best practices for fulfilling civic infrastructure that foster a more effective and inclusive democracy.

The time for this is now. Despite hard-fought victories and lessons learned from failures, many people working in politics privately acknowledge a hard truth: our current approach isn’t working. Every two years, people build campaigns, mobilize voters, and drive engagement, but they are held back by what they don’t understand about the long-term impact of their efforts. VX thinking can help solve that.

This essay was written with Hillary Lehr, and originally appeared on the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s website.

Tags: democracy, voting

Posted on May 22, 2025 at 7:06 AM • 22 Comments

Comments

Beatrix Willius • May 22, 2025 7:37 AM

How do you get voters to actually think and not believe any garbage? That is the only question we need to solve. Well, unless mango man in the Murica does away with elections or makes the elections Russian style (only one person to vote for).

Bozo in ideho • May 22, 2025 9:05 AM

Joseph Stalin once said, (seriously): “In any election, it does not matter who got the most votes – those who get to COUNT THE VOTES is what and who matters.”

What were those “UFOs” doin on the East Coast around and during the Election time in USA? And who owns some Satellite ISPs in MURKY MERCA? And is it not possible to fly ANYTHING AND ANYONE AND ANYTIME in and out of the country if the Communication Towers for landings and takeoffs are taken OFFLINE?
There are DELIBERATE REASONS FOR THESE OUTAGES lately at the Airport Control Towers.
CASH, GOLD, YOU NAME IT – can be, will be, and IS being taken out of the country but the Air Traffic/Flight Tower
does not record it if it is DISABLED/OFFLINE? When DOES THE SHEEPLE IN THIS COUNTRY WAKE UP?

You OFFER A SINCERE HELP, PRO-BONO, to volunteer for Jim Risch’s campaign – NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU ARE A TARGET OF MORMON FBI, MORMON CIA and other BS – DESTROYING AN INNOCENT AMERICAN FAMILY. Weclome to ideho – THE WORST NIGHTMARE FOR ANY DECENT HUMAN BEING!

Daniel Adam • May 22, 2025 10:40 AM

This essay is an exercise in treating symptoms. Which is probably to be expected when the author is a technologist who views everything through the prism of his chosen discipline.

Over the years this blog has shifted from technology gradually outwards as the author has grown less enchanted with the same old thing and sought to branch out. But there is a point where an expert in one field is simply casting themselves as an expert in another.

And people should know when they’re stretching things a bit in an effort to stay in the spotlight.

Sam Parker • May 22, 2025 11:33 AM

“If we want democracy to thrive long-term” – There’s your first mistake. The powers make the rules around elections and processes aren’t interested in creating the best democracy and experience for voters. Consolidating power is what they’re optimizing for and giving the voting public a bigger say in the matter runs counter to that.

A system, no matter how dysfunctional it may seem to you, is functional to SOMEONE, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. If you can figure out who that someone is and what the system does for them, you’ve taken the first step in reforming said system.

I love the ideas presented in this article and believe a more democratic experience is better for 99% of the world. The bigger problem isn’t solving for process and technology. It’s wrestling control of the system from those that control it today. Perhaps an exploration of this would be a topic for a future article?

Thresher • May 22, 2025 12:15 PM

This VX narrative misses the real underlying issue of CX (Citizen Experience with their government)

Elections are a minor aspect of CX , but fool most people to believe that average citizens somehow actually control their government’s vast activities and endless rules imposed upon the citizenry

kiwano • May 22, 2025 12:20 PM

@Beatrix Willius:

It sounds like you’re suggesting that an important metric in VX would be the relative impact of messages that either support or undermine a voter’s belief in the fairness of the electoral process. Honestly, I think there’s a lot of value to be had in tracking messages that undermine voter faith in fairness of the electoral process.

Where such a lack of faith is well-founded (e.g. around campaign finance policies in the United States), this sort of monitoring can draw attention to the need for policy reform. On the other hand, where such a lack of faith is not well-founded (e.g. a disinformation campaign in the most recent Canadian federal election suggesting that providing pencils instead of pens in the polling booths would enable the changing of ballots — if the chain of custody on marked ballots is weak enough to allow the erasure of marks, then it’s also weak enough to allow mailcious spoilage of previously valid ballots), those people who are the most engaged in the election process (i.e. campaign and election officials) should be inviting people to see the integrity of the system for themselves by volunteering in roles that uphold it.

In the Canadian election I mentioned in my parenthetical remark, my co-parent ran a polling station, and I volunteered as a scrutineer. When the disinformation campaign about the pencils hit social media, we shared a bit of disappointment that none of the campaign offices seemed to respond to those posts with messages along the lines “if you’re worried about election security, help secure the election by volunteering as a scrutineer with our campaign”. I have a hunch that a focus on VX, as contemplated in this paper, might have produced that sort of messaging.

It’s a lot harder to lie convincingly to people about something that they have first-hand involvement in.

@Daniel Adam:

If you read the byline at the bottom of the essay, you’ll see that Bruce has a coauthor, and if you do even the most cursory research into said coauthor, you’ll see that she’s a professional political consultant. I’d be willing to bet that if you were to to review this blog to see where Bruce started to “branch out” as you put it, that said branching out would correlate pretty strongly with Bruce’s exposure to opportunities for cross-discipline collaboration, and that most (if not all) of the specimens of articles outside his expected expertise that make up this branched out corpus are in fact collaborations with relevant experts in the other fields. I don’t think that Bruce is trying to stay in the spotlight so much as he’s trying to share it.

David Leppik • May 22, 2025 2:07 PM

Usually in UX the focus is on ease, and convenience. But when the goal is meaningful, fulfilling experience, convenience can rob people of the experience.

I’d suggest a system in which the Election Day and a few days of counting are official holidays in which the public is encouraged to be involved in hand counting the ballots. Would this be expensive, inconvenient, and even a little impractical? Absolutely! But if everyone knows someone who was involved in the tabulation process, everyone is familiar with the safeguards and has reason to trust the process and the democratically elected government.

In contrast, the US system is usually viewed from the perspective of partisan strategists. Hence the focus on red, blue, and swing states, with the implication that only the swing states matter. In fact, all the states matter but the non-swing states are taken for granted.

Ronda Davidson • May 23, 2025 3:34 AM

We’ve turned elections into a bloated app with too many features, zero onboarding, and constant push notifications from accounts we don’t remember following. Campaigns are optimizing for clicks, donations, and data points — but not for the actual experience of being a voter in the middle of it all.

Winter • May 23, 2025 4:11 AM

Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?

I think it is money.Money destroys trust. The more money is seen spend on, eg, campaigns, the more trust erodes.

Elections run best where campaign finances are severely restricted and every electable gas equal funds.

Eber • May 23, 2025 5:58 AM

@Winter

You are ‘missing’ a basic factual understanding of the nature of “GOVERNMENT” — it ain’t what you think it is !

Winter • May 23, 2025 6:20 AM

@Eber

[Government] ain’t what you think it is !

Please enlighten me. Tell me what government really is.

And it is not enough to describe the US dumpstefire. There are 8B people in the world, and less than 5% live in the US.

So, please, include other the situation in countries.

Winter • May 23, 2025 6:21 AM

@Eber

[Government] ain’t what you think it is !

Please enlighten me. Tell me what government really is.

And it is not enough to describe the US dumpstefire. There are 8B people in the world, and less than 5% live in the US.

So, please, include other the situation in countries.

Grima Squeakersen • May 23, 2025 2:19 PM

@Winter; @eber re: “government”

“Government” is the administrative instrumentality of the State. The State was established in sixteenth century Europe as an arguably laudable attempt to protect territorial societies from the ravages and instabilities resulting from religious wars. Unfortunately the philosophers whose works inspired this effort (Nicolai Machiavelli and others like him) decided that in order to pursue that goal, the State must institute an absolute monopoly on the use of violence, even precluding individuals from employing it to defend themselves from attack. Inevitably, and predictably, the people who sought positions that were authorized to administer that monopoly on behalf of the State, understood it to confer almost unlimited, unearned power over others, exercised that authority in such a way that they personally benefited, and went to great lengths to avoid ever relinquishing it.

For a more comprehensive essay on the development of the State, and consequentially, of government, you might search for “The Making of the State” by Roberta A. Modugno.

lurker • May 23, 2025 2:23 PM

@Winter
“So, please, include [] the situation in [other] countries.”

@Bruce: That comment should also be addressed to our host. The continual series of “re-imagining dmocracy” articles is so much armpit gazing.

Consider systems where there is no red-blue divide, or if here is then there is a strict cap on party expenditure; donations are limited in size and/or must be publicly disclosed. Does having to cobble up a coalition of minor parties really rob the votes from those whose party ends up out of power?

There is a system where the peons vote for their village council from people they know and see in the street every day. The village council elects the county council, who elect the city council, and on up the chain. No peasant ever votes for the Secretary-General of the CCP. Sure, he gets there by cronyism, possibly corruption, but the system allows in theory for him to be pushed aside from below.

What is the voter experience of the current US system when the winner of an election can disregard the rule of law?

Winter • May 23, 2025 6:18 PM

@Grima Squeakersen

Unfortunately the philosophers whose works inspired this effort (Nicolai Machiavelli and others like him) decided that in order to pursue that goal, the State must institute an absolute monopoly on the use of violence, even precluding individuals from employing it to defend themselves from attack.

I assume these philosophers and those politicians drawing up the plans for the new nations had lived through the times when the state did not have the monopoly of violence. And states existed before the peace of Westphalia that ended a string of the most bloody wars in human history. It were these states that had fought for 30 years in the area of what is now Germany, having been at war for at least 50 years before, and more.

The states before the institution of a state monopoly of violence were riddled with petty vendettas between armed clans.

The story of Romeo and Julia in Verona is just one famous example of Italian families in the powerful city states that lived in fortified estates and fought each other with arms.

Armed citizens that take the law in their own hands have never been a recipe of peace and prosperity.

Inevitably, and predictably, the people who sought positions that were authorized to administer that monopoly on behalf of the State, understood it to confer almost unlimited, unearned power over others, exercised that authority in such a way that they personally benefited, and went to great lengths to avoid ever relinquishing it.

This relation between power and corruption is as old as the chiefdoms found in prehistorical neolithical villages. That is not an invention of the Republic, the Nation State, or Democracy.

What happens is that in every society, groups of people have a tendency to team up against the rest and try to lay their hands on all the power and wealth.

You see it happening life in the US.

The problem is not the ignorant reality star that is now occupying the White House. The problem are the sections of US society that want to deny the rest of the US their part of the economic pie and want grab the whole pie for themselves.

Bobthebuilder • May 23, 2025 8:54 PM

I think the main issue with VX as opposed to UX is that UX is a non-advisarial process. The all of those involved in UX want the user to have the best experience possible in using the UI given constraints like monetisation and resources.

VX is designed by many groups who all want to have things go their way, often at the expense of the other groups involved. And as such it will be extremely difficult to have non-partisan efforts to improve VX. What if non-spamming rules inhibit Party A from running their classic fear campaign that always swings votes? Etc etc. I’m sure partisan VX might be an interesting line of thinking to parties, but as you point out will most likely damage the overall experience.

lurker • May 23, 2025 9:23 PM

@Winter, ALL
“… the most bloody wars in human history.”

Surely the Warring States period in China (~500-221BCE) included the most bloody wars in human history. During this period philosophers abounded, wandering from state to state attempting to persuade the various rulers of their doctrines of peace and prosperity. But no king could see any personal advantage, power, prestige or money, in pursuing a policy of peace and loving their fellow men. It took a tyrant, Qin Shi Huang-di, to unify the “tribes”, and impose a single government over the land now known as China.

From that day to the present, rulers of China, benevolent or despot, have insisted that governance comes from one man at the top, or as @Grimea observes, an absolute monopoly on the use of violence. Disturbances to this rule came from fratricide or from rebellions led by disgruntled officials. On paper at least, the present system says that China is governed by the Central Committee, but they have a partly self-perpetuating executive function known as the Politburo.

Ordinary citizens, from the time of the First Emperor until today, have kept their eyes open and mouths shut, and got on with their lives. Is this any better or worse than the current system in Nigeria, Bolivia, wherever?

Winter • May 24, 2025 1:11 AM

@Lurker

Surely the Warring States period in China (~500-221BCE) included the most bloody wars in human history.

Sorry, I intended to write “… one of the most bloody wars …”

It’s number 9 on the list of most bloody conflicts by percentage of global population that dies.

`https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Is this any better or worse than the current system in Nigeria, Bolivia, wherever?

Those Chinese living during one of the more interesting times would say they prefer the current system in China. When given a real choice, they would prefer Switzerland, but they generally do not believe they could get that lucky.

Most people in the world prefer peace and prosperity over war and poverty. Or so they say. That is irrespective of the underlying system.

Curiously, when their great grandparents who lived through the interesting times have died, people seem to start to long for War and Poverty again. And then we see politicians like Hugo, Vladimir, and their admirors who promise the glory of continuous war to rise to power again.

Winter • May 24, 2025 4:54 AM

@lurker

Surely the Warring States period in China (~500-221BCE) included the most bloody wars in human history.

I think you mean the wars of the Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE). The death toll of these wars corresponded to around 15% of the human population at the time.

The Han dynasty had lead to unprecedented peace and prosperity. Most of it lost again in adventurous attempts to loot it all.

Rontea • May 25, 2025 10:37 AM

This is a crucial topic, especially as we see growing concerns about trust in our electoral systems. The idea of using user experience principles to enhance the voter experience is brilliant. It emphasizes the importance of understanding voter perceptions and interactions, which can lead to more engaging and transparent processes. By improving the user-friendliness of voting systems, we not only make them more accessible but also help rebuild trust in our democratic institutions. These efforts could be key in increasing civic participation and ensuring that elections are seen as fair and reliable.

piglet • June 4, 2025 3:24 AM

What a useless framing. Election campaigns are not run for the benefit of voters. A big part of the economic elite has renounced the post war compromise of liberal democracy and the rule of law. They think they don’t need democracy any more and have opted to install a fascist system that they think will work in their benefit. Their explicit aim is to erode trust in democratic institutions and elections and that’s what drives the propaganda we are experiencing.

Rontea • June 8, 2025 1:56 PM

@piglet

“They think they don’t need democracy any more and have opted to install a fascist system that they think will work in their benefit.”

Even after the strategic victories over fascism in past conflicts, we find ourselves in a continuous struggle against its ideologies. This persistent battle arises because the defeat of fascism on the battlefield did not eradicate the conditions that allow authoritarian ideologies to flourish. The seductive nature of power, control, and the promise of simple solutions to complex problems can lure individuals and groups who feel disenfranchised or threatened by the pace of change in modern society.

The lingering presence of fascist ideologies today is partly due to the cyclical nature of history and human behavior. There is always a segment of the population that feels left behind by the advance of democracy and liberal values, which they might perceive as chaotic or morally corrupt. This can prompt a retreat into authoritarianism, seen as a bastion of order, tradition, and unity.

Moreover, these ideologies are often resurrected by those in power—economic elites and political leaders—who find the simplistic and divisive narratives beneficial for consolidating their control. By undermining trust in democratic institutions and exploiting social divisions, they can manipulate public sentiment to dismantle the democratic frameworks that once championed equality and freedom.

Thus, the fight against fascism continues as a defense of these democratic ideals and as a reminder that vigilance is required to safeguard the freedoms we hold dear. It is a testament to the enduring struggle for a society that values diversity, justice, and the rule of law above the allure of order and control at any cost.

The Voter Experience

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