Pink sheets and ghana's 2012 election petition: Toward system-disruptive documentation

This chapter takes on the notion of the legal significance of technical documents by discussing the pink sheets that became the heart of the 2012 landmark historical election petition in Ghana. The heated exchanges around pink sheets over the course of eight months, especially the confusion over the role of serial numbers on the pink sheets, touch on the core of our disciplinary conversations about design, usability, and accessibility. It also questions the ability of technical documents to capture complex information in a clear, pure, accurate, efficient, effective, and objective way. More importantly, it shows how texts, as election technologies, are enmeshed in power struggles and how a text can impact the electoral process of a country. It also shows that users can approach documents in a critical way and not just functionally. I consider the pink sheet a technical document and an election technology. As a technical document, the pink sheet "is concerned with procedure and instruction" about how to accurately record electoral results. More so, it presents users with information about how "to engage or (comply) with" the electoral system of Ghana. As election technology, pink sheets shaped the electoral process (a form of surveillance) and it exposed the assumption that when users piously follow instructions provided, results of the election will be accurately reported or captured, and everyone involved would be happy. It also exposed the assumption that users will piously comply with the instructions that have been designed.