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Center for Civic Design

Our goal is to make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant. We bring civic design skills in research, usability, design, accessibility, and plain language to improve the voting experience, make elections easier to administer, and encourage participation in elections. Through our work, we have helped hundreds of election officials build their skills and capacity, and touched millions of voters in small but important ways. Across all of our projects, our research suggests that the voter journey—all of the information, decisions, interactions that get a voter from an intention to vote to actually casting a ballot—is a story of seemingly small barriers that can add up to a vote not cast. Our projects and research starts from the causes of those burdens. By smoothing out those barriers, our work can help more people vote, and strengthen democracy.


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cubes with the united states flag and the word U.S.A, 3D render

cubes with the united states flag and the word U.S.A, 3D render

Getty Images

Independents Could Decide the Nov. 3 Election Amid Rising Discontent

The Tue., Nov. 3 midterm election is about six weeks away. According to recent research, 27% of U.S. adults identify as Democrats, 27% as Republicans, and 1% as members of a third party. This leaves a massive 45% of Americans who identify as political independents.

An analysis of self-identified independents, whether conducted by Gallup or the Pew Research Center, finds that about 47% lean toward the Democratic platform, 42% favor GOP policies, and 10% are “truly” independent.

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Statue of justice, gavel, and open book on table
Statue of justice, gavel, and open book on table

Partisan Loyalty Now Drives Americans’ Trust in Justice

Americans have rarely trusted their institutions less. In June, Gallup found average confidence in the 14 institutions it tracks was near a record low. Some 9% of the public trusted Congress, 27% trusted the Supreme Court, and 45% trusted the police. The criminal justice system, as a whole, ranked near the bottom.

Below those totals, however, lies a more telling story of divergence. Trust increasingly depends not on how an institution behaves, but on whether your side happens to run it. Republicans and Democrats each only have even a modest degree of confidence in Congress when their party is in control.

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Cardboard ballot box with a voter slip being placed into it by a hand, with a blue and red coloured background.

Cardboard ballot box with a voter slip being placed into it by a hand, with a blue and red coloured background.

Getty Images

The Leverage Ethic and the Spirit of Tripartisanship

I made the immodest proposal in my edited interdisciplinary volume Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework that the contemporary analogue to what Max Weber called the "Protestant Work Ethic" in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was what I called "the Leverage Ethic."

Moreover, I suggested that the Leverage Ethic has more or less replaced what the late Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell called the "Consumer Ethic" in his classic book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, which he argued more or less replaced the Protestant Work Ethic.

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Donald Trump holding a picture

President Donald Trump holds an image showing the size of Meta’s new data center during a cabinet meeting on Aug. 26, 2025.

(Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images/TCA)

Trump is on the wrong side of AI issue

I’ve covered a lot of elections — and most times, the issues that are going to really matter to voters aren’t brand new or sprung on them with just two months to go, arriving out of nowhere. They’re predictable — the economy, a war, a long-contentious policy fight.

This year is different. While most voters tell us their biggest concern is affordability, a new issue has entered the chat, taking up an outsized amount of space on the campaign trail, on the airwaves, and in party war rooms.

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