13 Nov 2006 2151H

Still more on voting machine issues

Of the millions who cast their ballots last week, I did not use the system with the touch-screen interface. I was afraid of it not counting my vote, and because I was kind of in a hurry, I just did the paper ballot instead, which I believe was designed specifically for Cook County by Marcia Lausen, a design prof at UIC, just a mile or so away from here, as part of the joint AIGA/UPA project, Design for Democracy, and author of this book, Design for Democracy: Election Design, so I was indeed mistaken when I wrote earlier that this is something that has not been undertaken by IAs (and I apologize).

This is a clear case of design for users, design being used to solve a problem, not just look good, and Victor Papanek would have smiled, perhaps, since it benefits society and strengthens democracy. The information system for that form was quite simple. Besides each name there was a broken arrow (<- -) and to vote for that person you just connected the arrow (<---).

As for the voting system, the actual demo from Sequoia Systems is here:

It seems simple enough, but, for instance, the system did not apparently report state of progress. So if you had several pages as we do in this county, the system reportedly would not tell you if you were done. It was reported, anecdotally on the radio, that one elderly woman had walked away, believing she had voted; by the time the election judges discovered the error, she had left and the machine could not count her vote as completed, so, it didn’t count. Perhaps it did, or did not, in any case . . . by and large the errors reports though have been correlated higher with age, but one gets the feeling that if the systems had been subjected to a rigorous public scrutiny of their user experience, along with some introduction period in the weeks before, that this would have helped with acceptance. As it stands, voting machine companies have been very defensive and secretive about their vulnerabilities, and this has not led to greater acceptance.

For more info on what could go wrong, you can go check out this advocacy section from the Electronic Freedom Foundation on e-voting, http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/. There are still those who say that this is using technology to solve a problem that can be best solved without technology. Yet, I don’t hear too many people saying somebody better put the brakes on this e-voting. I think people have resigned themselves to it.

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