Just couldn't help noticing. The last five years or so, each polling place is becoming less and less a place, and more and more an afterthought of where to park a cardboard booth with tenty curtains and folding card tables. As touching as this humility is, and this extends to the various call party locations that sprouted like erstwhile Tupperware parties around the 'hood this summer and fall, what does it say about the public priorities of the polis at large?
This is my first blog ever, and I hope to hear more about individual voters' experiences of the architecture of polling places, or what they felt casting their ballots in what at times felt like little more than a janitor's closet with good signage. There is an awesome website http://pollingplaces.nytimes.com where voters are pooling images of where they voted. In doing some preliminary web-search, I did discover that the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) adopted Design for Democracy's guidelines for ballot design (as usual, the graphic designers are way ahead of us architects).
So, here's a thought: we all know The Story of Online Retailing, in which the fly-by-night purveyors crumbled into dot-com oblivion through a failure to create bricks and mortar distribution systems to support their retailing activities. We've (mostly) seen the photos of Amazon's Orwellian automated warehouse systems and monster distribution centers, and they seem to be doing okay. What if the same thing happens to this internet voting revolution? Why is there no such thing as a permanent polling place? A building designed primarily to accommodate the neighborhood vote? Sure, it's only used for that purpose 1-2 times a year, but isn't it important enough to prioritize this as a building program? Surely, such centers could be programmed year round to encourage civic education and engagement--call party rentals, research centers, etc. It just seems like the time has come to concretize the polling place and take our right to vote as seriously as we take our right to check books out of a library.
I'm just sayin'...can we study this? Like how many precincts exist in the U.S.? Can we map it? Can we imagine it? The de-centralization of publicly funded architecture into a fine spray of polling places across the country seems like a great counterpoint to the City Hall, an anachronistic symbol of centralized power and cronyism. Student competition anyone?
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