India just finished a mammoth election. With over a billion people it's the world's largest democracy by far, and with several hundred languages, at least two alphabets, and only a ⅔ literacy rate communication is a challenge.
So I'm fascinated by this photo of a ballot. Every candidate is represented by their name in Sanskrit, Roman, and with an abstract symbol. Vote for the train, the whistle, or the telelvision set? Such a simple way to help people who can't read pick their candidate.

The collection above is from an incomplete list of symbols I found online. The icons look abstract to my American eye, but they're symbolicly rich for snarky deconstruction.

politics
  2009-05-22 17:52 Z