[ATTW-L] Center for Civic Design's field guide for mail-in ballots

[Dubinsky, Jim]

Hi Sam,

Thank you for sharing this site and the reminder about the TC issue in 2018.  I will add them to my syllabus on Rhetoric, Civic Discourse, and Public Policy (the focus of the senior seminar I’m teaching this fall for our PTW major). The general name for the capstone course is English 4874: Issues in Professional and Public Discourse.

One of the issues I’m focusing on is voting rights. We’re going to read One Person, No Vote by Carol Anderson as part of a case study on the history/impact of the 1965 VRA.

I, as always, appreciate your keen eye and willingness to share wonderful information and teaching resources.

Hope you are staying safe.  Jim

James M. Dubinsky, PhD
Associate Professor, Rhetoric & Writing, D/English (0112)
Executive Director, Association for Business Communication (ABC)
(540) 641-2564


From: ATTW-L <attw-l-bounces at attw.org> on behalf of "Dragga, Sam" <Sam.Dragga at ttu.edu>
Date: Friday, August 7, 2020 at 10:33 AM
To: "attw-l at attw.org" <attw-l at attw.org>
Subject: [ATTW-L] Center for Civic Design's field guide for mail-in ballots

If you are looking to start the semester with a propitious (and potentially inspiring) example of technical communication in action, consider the Center for Civic Design’s newest field guide, Designing Vote at Home Envelopes and Materials, at https://civicdesign.org/fieldguides/104-designing-vote-at-home-envelopes/.
This illustrated guide for election officials covers the information design choices and practical decisions involved in creating mail-in ballots for the 2020 elections.
The Center for Civic Design offers a series of field guides at https://civicdesign.org/fieldguides/ that might be pertinent to your classes: for example, Designing Usable Ballots, Writing Instructions Voters Understand, and Testing Ballots for Usability.
This material could also be paired with readings from the 2018 special issue of Technical Communication (65.4) on election technologies, which was guest edited by Godwin Agboka and Isidore Dorpenyo.  In addition to the introduction by the guest editors, “Election Technologies, Technical Communication, and Civic Engagement” (pp. 349-353), this issue offers the following articles:

  *   Fernando Sánchez, “Racial Gerrymandering and Geographic Information Systems: Subverting the 2011 Texas District Map with Election Technologies” (pp. 354-370)
  *   Natasha N. Jones and Miriam F. Williams, “Technologies of Disenfranchisement: Literacy Tests and Black Voters in the US from 1890 to 1965” (pp. 371-386) [NOTE: Recipient of the 2020 CCCC Award for Best Article Reporting Historical Research or Textual Studies in Technical and Scientific Communication.]
  *   Jennifer Sano-Franchini, “Designing Outrage, Programming Discord: A Critical Interface Analysis of Facebook as a Campaign Technology” (pp. 387-410)
  *   Jim Nugent, “Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Ballots: Technical Communication and Trust in Electoral Systems” (pp. 411-422)
  *   Matthew Bridgewater, “Ethos in Electoral Technology Company Web Spaces” (pp. 422-431)

Sam

Sam Dragga
Professor Emeritus, Texas Tech University
Editor, Technical Communication
sam.dragga at ttu.edu
1-806-543-6099

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