YOUR BALLOT WILL BE ARRIVING IN THE MAIL SOON, AND YOU MAY NOTICE THAT A HANDFUL OF ISSUES ARE WRITTEN LIKE THIS — IN ALL CAPS. If it feels like your ballot is yelling at you, that’s by design. But that design may not be serving its purpose. The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), a state constitutional amendment approved by Colorado voters in 1992, includes a provision requiring the title of issues involving tax and debt increases appear on the ballot in all caps. That provision is also codified in state statute.
Not all tax-related measures appear in all caps. On this and previous years’ ballots, only the measures dealing with increases and extensions appear in capital letters, while those that involve a decrease or a change in how tax dollars are invested, like in the cases of propositions HH and II, appear in sentence case.
Douglas Bruce, the conservative activist, ex-attorney and former legislator who authored TABOR, says he added the capitalization requirement for emphasis.
“I’m trying to shout at people as best you can in a ballot title,” he says.
While the intent may have been to call attention to tax increases for voters, many organizations specializing in accessibility and design say all caps can make text more difficult to read.
In fact, in the American Institute of Graphic Art’s Design for Democracy Report on behalf of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the number one election design guideline is to use lowercase letters, which the authors say improves legibility.
Whitney Quesenbery, executive director at the Center for Civic Design, says sentence case, a mix of lowercase and capital letters, is easiest for people to read because it’s what we’re used to. Plus, she says that modifications to text used for emphasis — like bold, italics or caps — lose their value when the entire block of text is emphasized.
While capitalization may seem like a relatively small issue, Quesenbery says seemingly minor design choices add up.
“When you get into one of those things like a ballot question that is all caps, it’s a little hard to read because maybe the text size is a little small, and maybe the language isn’t that easy to [understand] — essentially, the weight of those little tiny barriers adds up to people just skipping it,” she says.
Doing away with the all-caps requirement would call for legislative change, and Quesenbery says that’s unlikely to happen for a single code revision. Grouping several pieces of the statute to change at once is often more effective. She also says it’s important to test changes to ballot design with voters.
For Quesenbery, changes to ballot design provisions are “absolutely, positively worth it.”
“Every time someone has trouble understanding what to do, or what they’re being asked to vote on, their well of confidence is diminished by a drop or two,” she says. “And eventually, you drain that well of confidence.”
