This Is What Democracy Looked Like, the first illustrated history of printed ballot design, illuminates the noble but often flawed process at the heart of our democracy. An exploration and celebration of US ballots from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this visual history reveals unregulated, outlandish, and, at times, absurd designs that reflect the explosive growth and changing face of the voting public. The ballots offer insight into a pivotal time in American history--a period of tectonic shifts in the electoral system--fraught with electoral fraud, disenfranchisement, scams, and skullduggery, as parties printed their own tickets and voters risked their lives going to the polls.
Biographical Note:
Alicia Yin Cheng is a founding partner of MGMT. design in Brooklyn, New York. She currently serves as an external critic for the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at Yale University, Maryland Institute College of Art, Barnard College, and Cooper Union. Cheng was a past board member of the AIGA/NY chapter and the Fine Arts Federation.
Review Quotes:
"This Is What Democracy Looked Like is bookended by the same humble artifact: the 'butterfly ballot' that notoriously swung the 2000 election. As an introductory essay notes, 'the structure and design of the ballot can have enormous consequences for how politics function or fail us.' Showing hundreds of examples of voting ephemera, Cheng stresses their relations to historical power struggles. The ballot was-and is-also a site of conflict for disenfranchised groups, who fought for the monumental mundanity of suffrage. 'While the more contemporary versions may be less graphically outrageous, ' Cheng writes, 'that is also the point.'
- Metropolis
"Cheng has produced a truly interdisciplinary work, employing the material culture of this country's elections as the centerpiece of three essays on the democratic process....Almost 200 glorious examples of printed, mostly letterpress, ballots, many with candidates' names set in serpentine lines of type beneath semicircular party names and illustrations of flags, eagles, municipal buildings, and candidates' portraits."
- Library Journal
"Vividly illustrates how our ballots reveal the history of America's evolving politics and prejudices."
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"The first illustrated history of the printed ballot. It shows that controversy and confrontation at the polls is nothing new. The ballots offer insight into periods of tectonic shifts in the electoral system, and the fraud, disenfranchisement, scams and skullduggery that have historically plagued the electoral process."
- Design Arts Daily
