The occasion of mid-term elections in the United States -- a fateful election on which many critical issues turn -- is a fit time to examine the experience of voting.

In California, where I live (and in most other American jurisdictions), elections always happen on the first Tuesday of November, a day hardly conducive to getting working people to the polls. (This election, fewer than 40 percent of eligible voters are expected to cast ballots.) Voting polls, our Shrines to Self-Rule, are tables and booths and boxes stuffed into schools, churches, social clubs, and shopping malls. There's always a big American flag out front, conveying civic sanctity to these otherwise mundane locations. Polls are staffed by volunteer workers, nice people, usually retirees; lightly trained, they may even be paid (though it's likely they're not). As an alternative to voting at the polls, a citizen can choose to submit an "absentee ballot" that's prepared at home and mailed to the County Clerk. Absentee ballots are convenient all right -- I've used them -- but they negate the collective esprit that voting at the polls instills. I guess it depends on how time-pressured or agoraphobic you are, which method of voting you choose. Or like a vast number of cynical or uncaring Americans, neither.

Why is voting such an ambiguous experience? Subjectively, it's lauded as the citizen's highest calling. Objectively, the process is generally taken for granted and underfunded, on top of which we now have to deal with the controversy surrounding expensive, unreliable, and insecure digital voting systems. For months, citizens have been bombarded with political ads, direct mail, and opinions learned and lame, in print and online. From that noise we're expected to distill wise (I hope) choices, little smudges on a ballot.

After all that effort, I'm left with contradictory feelings: “Mission Accomplished!” versus “Is that all there is, my friend?”

The electoral privilege/chore/complicity of voting is the iconic way in which political decisions supposedly are made in democracies. Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. But standing before the God of Choice is always empowering -- and humbling. The poet Henry David Thoreau observed, “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.” Perhaps one day our political culture will mature and politics, with its deadly serious outcomes, will no longer be played as a game. In that better future, Americans, like their counterparts in parliamentary democracies, will become politically aware and active all of the time, not just every two or four years when an election rolls around.

Following are some design-relevant references to voting that I found informative and entertaining, each raising as many questions about the experience of voting as it answers:

• WQusability, “Voting for Usability: Background on the Issues.” In the aftermath of the botched 2000 general election, Whitney Quesenbery examines issues of usability associated with ballots and casting votes; candidate identification; how measures are presented to the electorate; and the sad inattention given to the voting process in most regimes, democratic and otherwise, as a way of reliably deciding the direction a society should take.

• LouiseFerguson.com, “Resources: voting and e-voting user experience.” Louise Ferguson compares conventional voting (using the ballot or a voting machine) with e-voting (conducted via a touch-screen or online). Her website includes over 200 references dealing with the voting experience.

• The Smithsonian Institution, “Vote: The Machinery of Democracy.” An attractive, comprehensive, multipage compendium of graphics and texts relating to voting. It contains among many other things voting trivia (the word “ballot” comes from the Italianballota, for the “little ball” that citizens in earlier democracies dropped into boxes to "cast a vote"), descriptions of the voting process past, present, and future -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and “Design for Democracy,” a Chicago-based project to redesign the entire voting experience.

• Commission on Federal Election Reform (CFER). Not that anyone in government paid it any attention, but CFER, chaired by former Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican Secretary of State James Baker, in September 2005 issued an extensive report containing 87 recommended reforms to voting as it's conducted in the US. As I write this entry, few of the reforms that CFER recommended have been implemented despite hundreds of millions of dollars having been allocated for this purpose. You can download the Commission's report in PDF format and view streaming interviews with Carter and Baker on the CFER website.

• Victorian Electoral Commission (Australia), “A Virtual Voting Experience in 19 Languages.” “Enter into a virtual world of election day voting.” Very charming; you'll need Flash. The Cambodian version is the most lyrically graphic, though I couldn't read a single word. If only real, inane initiatives could wear such smiley faces. Hey, wait, here in the US they do: just turn on your TV!

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The poet Robert Frost has the last word:
“Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting.”
So go vote.