“In the year 2004, the next presidential campaign after this one, you will find, in my opinion, the vast majority of states will already have Internet voting.”
– John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc. (January 20, 2000)
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
– Thomas Jefferson
I don’t mean to disparage Mr. Chambers. Though, in retrospect, it’s pretty funny to think that he may have actually believed we’d soon be voting online, less than 10 months before what happened in Florida in 2000. The point I want to make is that predicting the future is no simple task! Please note also that he made this prediction at a Brookings Institution symposium several weeks before the dot-com bubble burst.
Speaking of bygone eras, our recent November 4th election marked the end of another era. In Washington state, it signaled the end of polling places. All future elections, until further notice, will be mail by vote only, using paper ballots to be counted by optical scan machines. I talked to a number of voters outside the Madrona School in Seattle on Election Day, and many of them expressed profound sadness that the public experience of voting was coming to an end. They had taken their children with them to show them something they might never see again.
Farewell to Polls 2008: I voted!
It’s also soon to be the end of the Bush era and finally time, as many frustrated Americans have expressed, for the 21st century to begin. We’ve already seen President-elect Obama take an incredibly proactive approach in preparing his transition team to hit the ground running in January. We all know he’s got a whole lot on his plate, but after a decisive victory on Election Night, with no major systemic disasters occurring, few people are probably thinking much about the problems with our voting systems.
However, the system itself is still far from perfect and still susceptible to breakdowns and failures. Will voting machines and standards for approving and testing them be a top priority for government in the coming months? Will Election Day administration improve so voters don’t stand in line for hours? What other parts of the larger voting experience will be addressed now that there is time and attention to devote to it? Is there even the political will to do so?
What can we expect to be different by the 2010 midterms? And what will the 21st century voting experience be like in 20 years?
We believe that in 2028, paper ballots will still be in use (in some places, for some voters, and for some situations). But, that doesn’t mean things won’t be a whole lot different too…
Why would we still be using paper you may be asking incredulously? For the time being, the vast majority of voting system, computer science, and security experts agree that paper ballots with precinct count optical scanning is the best option we have. Such a system balances the needs for security, speed, accuracy, cost, and voter confidence since the ballot becomes a verifiable paper trail, a physical “backup.”
Professor Andrew Appel of Princeton University has said, “the ‘best’ voting system, whether it’s computerized or something else entirely, is the one that balances three key features: security, accountability, and public trust.”
The ideal voting system must balance these three features.
One of our big problems is that we Americans love speed and convenience so much. It’s practically a cultural obsession. Some experts — like Appel and cryptography and security expert Bruce Schneier, for example — would argue that our rush to increase the speed of elections (in order to scale to 130 million voters or more) has come at the expense of security and accuracy, which of course ultimately undermines public trust.
Even our so-called “news” organizations (the most notable exception, perhaps, being The New York Times) appeared to be in a ratings race on Election Night to call the contest first (remember the news organizations calling the election prematurely multiple times in 2000?). Nobody actually wants to wait for the counting to finish… we must be the first to call it! And with a holographic anchorwoman!
Taking Professor Appel’s three system features and the system diagram from the last post, the key is to think of the voting experience as a large, complex process involving many entities interacting over a protracted period of time starting long before Election Day — not just a brief transaction between a voter, a ballot, and a machine.
In this larger process, the most serious problem is widely regarded to be voter registration, and we’ll see that it will be one of the first major areas to be reformed. So, on that note, let’s move on to our predictions for the future…
The next five years:
1. The private vendors producing voting systems will continue to focus on marketing their optical scanning machines to election officials. Don’t expect a lot of new DRE systems to be developed and sold by this current crop of vendors. They will not be investing heavily in R&D, and while standards remain voluntary it is doubtful they will be doing a whole lot of testing and improving of current DRE equipment lines. It just ain’t worth it to them. Like one analyst said when Diebold changed the name of its election systems subsidiary to Premier Election Solutions, it was responsible for “5 percent of revenue and 100 percent of bad public relations.” And from state and local election officials’ point of view, there’s a pretty strong cost argument against touch screen DRE machines, which require more machines per voter than paper ballot and optical scan systems, with the additionally “expensive” risk of looking bad if something goes wrong.
2. The voter registration system will be overhauled to fit the needs of a modern and mobile society, early voting will be expanded, and more states considering new equipment will move to optical scan systems. Some of these states will become mail-in only. In terms of the voter registration issue, it could be a challenging and lengthy ordeal in the Congress since there’s the thorny issue of stepping on states’ toes, but in the end universal voter registration will become law, and eligible voters will be automatically registered, even when they move. Lawsuits and frustrations in dealing with third-party organizations submitting voter registration applications will be greatly reduced. Early voting will become available in all 50 states, not only providing voters with more convenience, but also distributing the load on the system and providing more opportunities to test the system and iron out potential complications as they occur.
3. Starting with the Obama administration (hopefully), we will see the beginning of a shift in culture toward listening to all sides of an issue; greater openness to the public, academic, and private spheres participating in and being heard by government; more cooperation and collaboration between all of these parties; and increased transparency of this process and its inner workings. This will lead to a better, multidisciplinary approach to standards development. But, government is slow. “The problem is that the pace of innovation is outstripping the pace of regulation,” says Doug Chapin, director of the Web site set up by Pew Center on the States, electionline.org. Expect the seeds to be planted, but the plant to take more time to flourish and bloom.
4. Along with greater transparency in government, we will see continued grassroots and community-based “policing,” documenting, and reporting of the election process on blogs, wikis, video sites, and other Internet destinations. This form of public oversight of the process will complement and even become a resource for state and election officials, who will be held accountable for overseeing the process, adhering to standards, protecting voters’ rights, and administering elections efficiently.
5. Congress will eventually create better and mandatory standards and guidelines for the development, testing, certification, design, and usability of voting systems and ballots. There will be actual oversight, enforcement, and accountability. Public watchdog groups will also participate in making sure that local and state election officials, voting system manufacturers, and others involved in either implementing or undermining the system are monitored by the public. Whoever ends up design and developing software for voting systems will have to open up their code to public scrutiny. As Bruce Schneier writes, ”computerised systems with these characteristics won’t be perfect — no piece of software is — but they’ll be much better than what we have now. We need to treat voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the US is significantly more meticulous than that applied to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.”
6. Voters will organically build communities, social networks, and devise new forms of civic engagement in the election process, particularly as the voting system itself becomes more “offsite,” rather than in polling places. Voluntary public gatherings, celebrations, and public multimedia installations will document, capture, and visualize the democratic process unfolding in real time, from the moment the candidates declare their candidacies through to the moment the votes are counted.
Within a decade:
7. Over the next decade, expect there to be major efforts to improve and expand eGovernment, including better integration of the hundreds of services provided by government. Databases and voter rolls will be cleaner, more accurate, and better synchronized. With a national chief technology officer, active citizen involvement, and the philosophies of openness and transparency, government websites and services will improve. Government will be more connected and integrated, and as a result will be more responsive and more effective. Tim O’Reilly believes that “there will be significant investment in applying the lessons learned from internet campaigning into the tools of internet governance. There are efforts already underway to build better tools for two-way communication, for government transparency, and for harnessing innovations from outside the public sector to improve the work of the public sector.”
8. Government will harness the collective intelligence of citizens in other ways as well. Crowdsourcing and open innovation methods, like government-sponsored contests (think the Ansari X Prize for voting machines), will lead to healthy competition among private companies, individuals, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits. This will help lead the way to Internet-based voting systems that are cryptographically secure, visually-intuitive, beautifully and effectively designed, and adaptive to different voter needs. Natural user interfaces will allow individuals to vote through a combination of physical gestures with their hands, eye-tracking, or voice commands. For the physically challenged, other input methods will also be supported. Don’t be surprised either if innovations in voting systems come from the outside, possibly even from unexpected sources or places (like India, which is the largest democracy in the world and already uses more than 1 million electronic voting machines in its elections). The advances in security, technology, and design made by these diverse sources will result in some initial large scale deployments of Internet voting. At first, Internet voting will be administered only at specific, smaller locations where it can be carefully monitored. With time, improvements will be made and problems will be addressed. Authentication of voters and determining their eligibility will have challenges that will have to be ironed out. Biometrics may be used for “signing in,” but the public will need time to grow comfortable with the idea. Voting from mobile or remote Internet devices will not happen in this timeframe, but with enough success could become available within twenty years. Be assured, however, that along with expanded early voting, more options will be available to voters on how they vote in order to meet the diverse needs of a populace in an increasingly complex world.
9. Real standards which stand up to the demands of our most knowledgeable security, technology, and design experts will finally become mandatory, enforceable, and applied in all of the republic. Developers of voting technologies and designers of complex election administration processes and procedures will be under the watchful eyes of government overseers, independent third parties, and the public. Better election administration will become another focus of innovation. As designers are brought to participate in the design of these services, processes, and systems as well, expect the voting experience to become more pleasant and reassuring. Gone will be the “time tax” that essentially is levied on voters forced to wait in long lines on Election Day. Nobody will have to wait for hours to vote. Improved administration will also mean more equitable distribution of equipment and resources, better training for poll workers, and improved preparation and procedures for emergencies or other Election Day breakdowns. According to Doug Lewis, head of the nonprofit Election Center, in the 2008 election, “everyone involved in conducting elections was just on pins and needles the entire year. Over-planning really helped… Election officials went to extraordinary lengths to have not only a Plan A, but a Plan B and a Plan C.” Through better communications and online sharing tools like wikis and social networking sites, expect the best practices of election administration, troubleshooting, and poll worker resources to be widely rated and made available.
In twenty years:
10. In the year 2028, voters will still have paper ballots as an option because: a) some states decide that paper works pretty well and gives the best bang for buck, b) some voters, especially older, less tech-savvy people, will be uncomfortable with electronic or other means of voting, or c) paper ballots will always be available in any election as part of good contingency planning. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, they will also have many other options available to them to make voting as easy as possible. Online voting will be available in some states, but not all. Some states will have expanded availability to any location, thus some voters will vote from home or remotely on mobile Internet devices. People will identify themselves and authenticate their eligibility to vote with a unique, randomly generated token which will be provided to them by the state. This token will not be linked in any way to other identifiers like name, address, or social security number. A voter will know immediately if his or her identity has been used already to vote. If it has been, a report can be filed instantly and directly to the government and other authorities. In addition, the voter would receive a new provisional token and be able to vote while the case is being resolved, which will have to occur rapidly. After submitting a ballot, whether online, on a DRE machine, or a paper ballot, not only will the election authorities have a paper ballot generated for audit purposes, but the voter will also have a unique, randomly generated tracking code provided which will be recorded with his/her vote and known only to that voter. It will not be retrievable if lost, but the voter will be able to use the code to later track his/her vote in the publicly available, online database which contains all precinct results being reported in real-time and transmitted up to the state level. Voters will finally be given the feedback they want and need: a way to actually track their votes, much like they can easily track a package moving through the FedEx or other delivery system. The system will be designed to protect the privacy and anonymity of the voter, since not other voter information will be attached to that record. This will provide voters confidence that their votes really did get counted and did not simply disappear into a dark, mysterious void.
Conclusion
So, that’s it. Though the future “voting booth” may not be that unrecognizable to a person from today, you can be sure that the truly cutting edge technologies will find their way into other aspects of the larger voter experience. At home, voters will have large walls or displays capable of displaying and visualizing large amounts of information about candidates and issues. They will interact with natural user interfaces to navigate through the complexity and enormity of the data in ways that will improve education and decision-making. There will be digital tools that will help guide them and prepare them for filling out ballots, by whichever method they choose to vote. And because government will be online, secure, and open, voters will also be able to mine the tabulated data in real-time, using visualization tools, so everyone can be their own John King. Of course, by then John King will have much cooler toys as well.
Outside of the home, augmented reality and powerful mobile Internet handhelds will also inform and enable voters with many of the same capabilities and resources, overlaying meaningful data, media, and realistic 3D models of people and other physical objects into voters’ field of vision. Public installations with interactive screens and surfaces, projected 3D holograms, and physical objects will also draw voters into the experience and educate, inform, and engage the populace in a dynamic, civic experience. Voters overall will be more active in the political process, leveraging the power of the Internet and social technologies to create communities and build intimate relationships between themselves and the candidates. These changes, in addition to the improvements in the registration system, expanded voting periods, and a diverse set of ballot-casting options, will also help to reduce voter apathy. Though voting from the privacy of one’s home will be preferable for some, most people will still seek out these communal experiences instead or in addition, particularly in states that no longer have physical polling places. They will choose to celebrate the democratic process and will find ways to connect with their close neighbors as well as distant communities through live, online feeds connecting small towns and urban centers across the country. Voter turnout will rise to above 70% in presidential elections because all of these changes will truly empower people and make them feel like they matter.
The media and news providers will still be trying to outdo one another with the latest applications of emergent technologies and digital tools. This will continue to provide amusing entertainment for the public, but expect people to find themselves less reliant on these sources and more deeply engaged in their own created and shared experiences — physical and virtual — where they make meaning of the unfolding political process.
As experts at the Brennan Center for Justice have pointed out, the system we have today for managing our elections and voting process is overly complicated and too vulnerable to error and manipulation. The goal of future reforms should be to utilize technology, design, policy, and other expertise to simplify the process, reduce variables which can lead to numerous and unexpected problems in the days and months before an election, and balance the needs for security, accountability, and public confidence without costing the taxpayers extraordinary amounts of money, time, or confusion. In the end, all these considerations will be factored with the requirements for election results to be determined accurately and efficiently, making the “voting booth” of the future so simple, flexible, and intuitive that voters won’t ever have to wonder if their voices will be heard. And in the event that they aren’t, we’ll all be alerted to it an instant.
So, what do all of you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the future voting experience…
“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
Voter Needs
So, what exactly are a voter’s needs today? We would contend that they are the following:
To be informed (about the issues, the candidates, the process, and the logistics)
Ease and clarity of registration
Convenient access to voting tools and polling places
Simplicity
Privacy and security
To feel confident that one’s vote matters, that it has been cast as intended, and has been counted
To feel a sense of participation and connectedness with one’s community
To have trust in the system and the outcome
All of these needs are critical, but we’ll keep most of the discussion that follows later in this post to the last three, which are key to motivating voters to participate. Confidence, trust, and connection ultimately result from a system that is open and transparent. If that system also follows principles of good, user-centered design and provides appropriate feedback, has built-in redundancy for vote tabulation, and includes real voters in the design and refinement of the processes and tools, then it should be a system that voters can trust, rather than one that produces the doubt and cynicism expressed by this Cincinnati woman in 2004.
(Mike Simons / Getty Images)
Being Informed: Voter Education
Let’s just make a couple quick points here about the need to “be informed” and the issue of convenience. Like President Roosevelt said, the real safeguard of our democracy is education. Today, as we face a rapidly changing world and increasing global competition, it will be critical that we focus on educating children for the jobs of the future and plan for re-training and continuing education for existing workers whose jobs may not remain for long. This is certainly one way in which education will represent a key to protecting our democracy.
But on the point of voter education, we also still have a long way to go. We personally know many well-educated, hard-working people who are excited about this presidential election, yet they admit ignorance about many of the local contests and initiatives/referenda on their ballots (they should check out Ballotpedia).
Nonetheless, the tools and access provided by the Internet are nothing short of astounding when it comes to addressing voter education. Wikis, social networking applications, Twitter reports, video sits, and user-generated content are complementing the vast resources available from government, the candidates’ campaigns, think tanks, and major media sources.
However, a plethora of tools and data alone doesn’t translate into actionable or useful information for voters. That is where information design and UX/UI design can play a more important role. In addition, not all Americans are exposed equally to the diversity of tools and information available (many probably stick to the more familiar sources) and there is a lot of misinformation available online as well. Despite these concerns, the explosion of interest and resources online is a positive trend that will only get better in the future.
Convenience
As to convenience, there is a powerful argument for making the process of registering and voting more convenient for and accessible to everyone. Despite moves to that effect, including early voting, “no excuse” absentee voting, and mail-in voting, we still hear stories today about people standing in line in Los Angeles, for instance, for 3-5 hours to vote early. And, contrary to what one might expect, mail-in voting has not necessarily increased voter turnout or participation. Furthermore, mail-in voting is susceptible to corruption and fraud in the form of coerced voting, vote buying, or forged signatures. However, voting from home also can protect individuals’ privacy, particularly those who might experience intimidation at polling places, and it makes it easier for the ill or physically-challenged to exercise their right to vote.
Some critics also argue that mail-in voting takes the social or civic engagement out of voting. This may be true in some cases, but we’ve also heard anecdotes here in Washington of voters filling out their mail-in ballots and dropping them off in person at City Hall in order to experience that sense of connection with the community.
Regardless of the critiques, these actions to increase convenience demonstrate a trend which will continue towards making the registration and voting process more convenient and sensitive to the needs of a diverse electorate. While there will always be a need to improve security to avoid electoral fraud, ultimately having these options will help prevent the disenfranchisement of voters by long lines or other inefficiencies and inconveniences that make the act of voting truly difficult for some people.
One additional need that we believe represents a great opportunity for future voting systems is providing a means for the individual voter to personally verify that his or her vote has been received and counted. The challenge there will be security and privacy, of course, but we can imagine a day when a ballot can be “tracked” like a package.
Obstacles and Inefficiencies
The current situation with the voter experience is rife with obstacles and inefficiencies which compromise voter needs and goals. These ongoing challenges for the future include, but are not limited to:
Voter suppression: a blanket term for the use of governmental power, political campaign strategy, and private resources aimed at reducing the total vote, sometimes involving intimidation, and ultimately leading to disenfranchisement
Disenfranchisement: explicitly through law, implicitly through intimidation, indirectly due to technical errors, or in a de facto way due to lack of training or misleading information
Voter purging: necessary in order to maintain dependable, up-to-date, and accurate voter registration lists (or “voter rolls”), but practiced without transparency and oversight, often in secrecy, relying on error-ridden lists, and without providing any sort of notice to those affected
Vulnerability to hacking: represents a serious concern to many voters and has been demonstrated repeatedly by computer science and security experts at Princeton, UCSB, and many other universities
Long lines: mentioned earlier, it may have many causes, including poor planning, machine failure, lack of resources, lack of training, and problems with voter rolls, which often results in voter disenfranchisement (or having only one location for early voting for all of Los Angeles!)
Electoral fraud: another blanket term which can describe any type of manipulation or interference with an election… nothing new, but an ongoing challenge, nonetheless
Misinformation and disinformation: the unintentional (former) and deliberate (latter) spreading of false information, which could be propaganda, mistakes that lead to voter confusion, or just election season dirty tricks attempting to suppress voter turnout during election period (like phony fliers)
Usability and design: given national attention by the problems voters had with the “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2000, this includes anything from information design to typography and alignment to wording and language to logic and feedback
Usability Issues
There has been a lot of attention in our community on usability issues related to paper and onscreen ballots. Several reputable organizations have taken it upon themselves to improve the process. After the 2000 election, AIGA Design for Democracy centered its focus on election design, beginning with solutions for election officials in Illinois and Oregon, and eventually developing design guidelines for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These guidelines help improve ballot design, both on paper and on screen, through improved readability, typography, graphic design, information hierarchy, and the use of simple, easy to understand language. The result is a valuable set of guidelines for election officials to vastly improve the usability of ballots.
In 2007, Design for Democracy also succeeded in publishing research and best practice recommendations for the information design of ballots and polling places, which were accepted nationally by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC is the independent agency of the U.S. government created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to serve as a resource for election administrators and to establish standards for voting systems (which as yet remain voluntary, by the way, likely explaining their lack of broad adoption).
In addition, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has produced a set of ballot design guidelines in collaboration with a number of the leading usability experts, designers, voting systems experts, political scientists, and election officials. They have identified 13 common design problems with ballots, as well as a number of state and local laws that actually interfere with good design and usability. For example, a recent editorial from The New York Times criticized a law that actually requires, albeit inadvertently, that ballots violate some obvious principles of good design: “New York has long had a misguided ‘full-face ballot’ law that requires every race to be listed on a single screen or piece of paper. Experts say that leads to information overload, voter confusion and errors.” The editorial staff goes a step further, adding that “there is also remarkably little usability testing before elections, which would allow officials to learn in advance when ballots have problems.”
While some local jurisdictions are probably applying the design principles successfully to their own ballots and polling places, due to the highly decentralized election system in this country, it is difficult to know exactly how pervasive the guidelines have become in one year.
Have qualified designers or consultants been brought in to create or review ballot designs, for example? Has this become a standard part of the process of local election officials?
We suspect that the answer is no, or perhaps not enough. In addition, we wonder to what extent real users, actual voters of different ages, origins, demographic, and psychographic makeup have been brought into the process. Have ballot designs, user interaction, polling place designs, and signage been tested with real users? An iterative approach involving rapid prototyping and testing could be very quick and effective without great expense, but we doubt that this has become engrained in the culture of election administrators on a large scale.
As a design consultancy, we would love to, for example, take the guidelines and standards developed for the EAC (as well as insights into voter needs and goals) and work with the software and hardware developers of DRE voting machines to create an improved user experience, vetted through concept and usability testing with actual voters. And, should every state choose to do things a little differently, we don’t imagine that state or local election officials would be wanting for help. Jon Pincus, the founder of the Voter Suppression Wiki, agrees: “there are more than 50 qualified design firms in the United States. So, that shouldn’t be a fundamental limitation.”
The Larger Voting Process
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves — and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”
– Tom Stoppard, British playwright
The Brennan Center estimates that tens to hundreds of thousands of votes are lost or miscast in every election due to bad ballot design, confusing instructions, and poor usability, resulting “in far more lost votes than software glitches, programming errors, or machine breakdowns.” In a close election, like several recent national and state contests, the disenfranchisement of this many voters can play a decisive role. As the Brennan Center argues, “candidates should win or lose elections based upon whether or not they are preferred by a majority of voters, not on whether they have the largest number of supporters who — as a result of education and experience — have greater facility navigating unnecessarily complicated interfaces or complex instructions, or because fewer of their supporters are elderly or have reading disabilities.”
We agree, but, it’s also important to put things in perspective.
One of the most lofty goals of a democracy should be the active participation of all of its citizens in the democratic process. As Thomas Paine wrote, “the right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.” Therefore, any discussion of elections and voting should remember to measure the relative gravity of a problem by the number of people it prevents from exercising their franchise as intended. So, by this measure, we could probably rank the problems we face as follows:
Apathy & laziness: several tens of millions of potential voters (source: Dr. Michael McDonald at GMU)
Voter suppression, purging, and disenfranchisement: hundreds of thousands to a few millions of voters (source: Brennan Center)
Bad ballot design and confusing instructions: tens to hundreds of thousands of lost or miscast votes in every election, which we assume includes electronic voting machines as well paper ballots (source: Brennan Center)
Long lines and other administrative inefficiencies leading to disenfranchisement: tens of thousands of voters? (our guess)
Hacking: none so far? (has anyone yet proven this to have happened?)
According to analysis from Dr. Michael McDonald at George Mason University, the voter eligible population in the 2004 general election was approximately 203 million, with about 60% turning out and voting for the highest office on the ballot. That means more than 81 million eligible voters did not vote.
Clearly, voter turnout is the most serious problem facing our voting system — a problem that will require a lot more than just better design and technology to improve.
To help illustrate the other issues, obstacles, and inefficiencies contributing to our many voting challenges, let’s consider this diagram of the larger voter process and ecosystem:
Larger Voting Process and Ecosystem
In the above sketch, the parts in red indicate areas that have aroused a lot of public concern due to the opacity of the process. Private companies are able to protect their intellectual property and don’t have to reveal how their machines work. In addition, despite the establishment of the EAC by the Help America Vote Act and the creation of standards and guidelines for voting systems and election administration, there are still concerns that the standards are voluntary and weak, and the process for vetting machines and software is fundamentally unsound.
Dr. Michael Shamos from Carnegie Mellon University minced no words in his testimony to the Environment, Technology, and Standards Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science on June 24, 2004: “I am here today to offer my opinion that the system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent. It must be re-created from scratch or we will never restore public confidence in elections.”
We would also like to see the process for development of software, hardware, and other voting technology to be open, transparent, and peer-reviewed. More participation from the public, the general technology community, scholars, and experts would help ensure that the machinery of our elections isn’t controlled entirely by private, and possibly partisan, companies.
The Brennan Center also recommends that the federal government increase its role in the process of voting system and ballot design and testing, for every machine model, and by providing funding for usability testing. We would add that the EAC should make standards mandatory and enforceable, encourage cooperation between election officials and design and usability experts, and take a more proactive role in the dissemination of standards and guidelines to state and local authorities.
Registration list maintenance by state governments also remains a highly opaque process which has led to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters. Research has found that “over the past several years, every single purge list the Brennan Center has reviewed has been flawed” and that many of those identified on purge lists were in fact eligible to vote. The Brennan Center outlines a number of recommendations we agree with that might help bring more regularity and accountability to the practice of voter roll maintenance.
So, where do digital tools and technologies play a role on the ecosystem diagram above?
For voters, wikis like the Voter Suppression Wiki and the Election Protection Wiki are helping to inform people as they prepare to vote and to document activities that may interfere with their attempts to exercise that right. Over time, that documentation becomes a valuable resource and record of the situation across the country. Twitter is being used as a rapid way to disseminate similar types of news and information on voter suppression and election integrity issues. Check out Twitter Vote Report and its visualization on Plodt for more. Additional information and reports are also available on Our Vote Live, and incidents can be reported through their hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
But notice the “voter limbo” in the diagram above. After submitting one’s ballot, whether it’s paper or electronic, the vote itself essentially disappears into the election administration machinery. Is there a future opportunity there? And all the tools for education and communication, yet often voters are surprised at what they see and experience at the polling place on Election Day? What about creating tools to accurately prepare ballots and check that they will be “readable” in advance? Couldn’t this also speed up the process at polling places?
If we look at what the media is doing, CNN’s John King is showcasing the amazing possibilities of multitouch displays on the cable news channel’s Perceptive Pixel multitouch display. These possibilities expand beyond just analysis of news to also allow simulations and scenarios to be explored quickly and visually. MSNBC is now doing the same with a Microsoft Surface table in its television coverage of the election.
The candidates themselves are definitely embracing technology and the Internet, in particular Barack Obama. Taking Howard Dean’s lead from the 2004 election, his campaign has leveraged the Internet, social networking sites, and other tools to create an impressive, yet highly decentralized grassroots organization of empowered supporters, with incredible fundraising prowess to boot!
In election administration, one big concern is the bad planning, poor allocation of resources, and untrained poll workers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees that “poorly-designed machines are not the only problem. Most election workers remain woefully under-trained regarding potential e-voting problems. Vendor technicians frequently have unsupervised access to voting equipment. Local election officials routinely deny attempts to examine e-voting audit data.” Can those processes be designed better?
One more opportunity for improvement in the future is addressing the lack of integration or synchronization of government services and databases which leads to many of the problems related to registration and voter purges. As Charles Owen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the IIT Institute of Design explains, “elections are just one more thing that government manages and orchestrates. There are so many services out there, and they are so independent and so difficult to weave your way through that it would seem to me rather obvious that we will be seeing… a move to integrate a lot of this within some kind of .org or .gov part of the overall networking system.” As it is today, he says, “it’s just so out of date.”
But, we’ll talk more about the future in our last installment… in the meantime, let’s brace ourselves for tomorrow, hoping that this historic election with an anticipated record turnout unfolds without any major issues cropping up to destroy public confidence in the process and divide the country any further.
Stay tuned for “Part 3: Trends and the Future of the Voter Experience”
“… crises precipitate change…
… secretly plotting your demise…
I wanna devise a virus
To bring dire straits to your environment
Crush your corporations with a mild touch
Trash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrus”
As mentioned in our preview posting, it seems that, as humans, it often takes a crisis in order for us to really change our ways or our technologies. Like the Deltron 3030 lyric above, in 2008 we appear to be “reverting toward papyrus” in a significant way in order to administer this general election with increased confidence. Election Data Services has predicted that about 56.2% of registered voters this year will be using paper ballots, up from 49.6% in 2006 and 35.6% in 2004.
Now, the reason for this is not necessarily an ominous virus bringing down the computer systems of the nation’s election administrators, however the threat of misdoings does exist with current systems, as many security and computer science experts have demonstrated, published, and attested to.
We’ll be posting a couple more installments in the next few days to follow this topic of the election and the voter experience, beginning today with Part 1: Voting Technology History. Prior to Election Day, we will follow up with:
Part 2: Voter Needs, Usability, and the Larger Voting Process
Part 3: Trends and the Future of the Voter Experience
Introduction
As recently as a few days ago, reports of problems in the 2008 general election began to emerge regarding direct recording electronic (DRE) voting systems in West Virginia which “switched” or “flipped” some voters’ selections onscreen before their eyes. These types of problems were most likely due to miscalibration of the touch screen systems – possibly from poor poll worker training or a lack of proper procedures for double-checking equipment prior to opening the polls – rather than computer viruses or other devious hacking of the machines.
It’s hardly comforting either that standards and guidelines for voting machines are weak and voluntary. Lack of robust engineering practice, testing, and certification also contribute to machines that are far from failsafe.
But, let’s face it. Vulnerabilities have always existed in our voting systems, whatever type they may be. And there will always be those who try to manipulate or game the system to their advantage.
It’s not just political parties, special interest groups, private enterprises, or powerful individuals who might be guilty. Even you, the innocent voter, may take advantage of loopholes in order to influence election outcomes (for example, maybe you moved this summer to California, were previously attending graduate school in Illinois for two years, but prior to that lived in Florida, where your driver’s license is from… and now you are voting absentee in the swing state of Florida because you believe your vote for Obama will have more impact there. Anyhow, I digress…).
According to Douglas W. Jones – a computer science professor at the University of Iowa who has testified many times before Congress as an expert on voting technology – despite the different types of voting technologies we’ve used in the last couple centuries, “when you factor in real-world variables, like ease of use and proper administration by poll workers, accuracy ends up being similar,” about one error in 10,000 votes.
So, let’s take a quick look back at where we’ve been.
From the Voter’s Mouth to the Voter’s Fingertip
Prior to the mid-19th century, voting was mostly done orally. A voter swore an oath to a judge and then stated his choices (in public, mind you) to election clerks who kept a tally. Partisan paper ballots or “party tickets” also existed in various forms throughout the 19th century. These tickets could be acquired before the election and listed only one party’s candidates. If you were okay with a straight party ticket, you simply stuffed your ticket into the ballot box without making any additional marks, or you could cross out those you didn’t want to vote for and write in who you preferred instead.
These ballots were neither standardized nor provided by the government’s election administrators, so voter fraud in the form of ballot box stuffing was a common problem. You could even write your own ballot on your own paper if you wanted! Other issues with this system included legibility of candidate names and the lack of voter privacy (since each party ticket looked different, in its color or paper type, and you could be seen with it in your hand).
Party Ticket (left) and Australian Style Ballot (right) (source: Smithsonian)
Eventually, the “Australian” style paper ballot – printed by the government and distributed at the polling place with all candidates’ names pre-listed on them – was adopted in the U.S. around 1888. This kind of paper ballot was essentially the same kind of paper ballot we still use today, with all the contest options listed and a circle, box, or arrow to fill in or complete in order to make your selection.
With the introduction of Australian ballots, one old form of fraud (casting multiple votes, or “ballot box stuffing”) became harder to pull off, so corrupt politicians and their political machines devised a new form of fraud – namely, questioning the way in which votes were actually counted.
This problem of subjective interpretation of ballot markings – which can be exploited to commit electoral fraud – continues to pose potential problems, not just with paper ballots but even with hanging or dimpled chad on punch cards, as we know too well from Florida in 2000.
Coincidentally, it was around the same time the Australian ballot became adopted in the U.S. that the first mechanical lever machine was first used, which essentially automated the vote tabulation process. The Myers Automatic Booth lever voting machine was first used in 1892 in Lockport, NY. By the 1930s, mechanical lever machines were installed in almost every major city, and by the 1960s well over half of all votes were cast on these machines.
Mechanical Lever Machine (source: Smithsonian)
Even as recently as the 1996 general election, 21.2% of registered voters cast their votes on mechanical lever machines, and 6.7% of registered voters will do so in the 2008 election (thanks to New York still using many of these older machines). Despite their durability, the problem with mechanical lever machines is that they do not store independent records of each voter’s ballot (they use a counter similar to an odometer on a car) which essentially negates the possibility of performing recounts.
This is where the punch card system came in. Originally used for controlling textile looms then later used for data entry, storage, and computing, punch cards only really took off as an election technology after IBM bought Harris Votomatic, Inc. in 1965. Although punch card technology had some known problems and high-profile critics (most notably, Roy Saltman of the National Bureau of Standards in the mid 1980s) arguing for their abandonment, these voting systems were used by more registered voters than any other type of voting technology for every election from 1986 to 1998 without any major controversy… and then, of course, Florida happened in 2000. But, let’s not get into that…
Punch Card System (source: Smithsonian)
Datavote systems were very similar to punch card systems, except that Datavote systems used a cutting tool and vacuum to clean away material from unperforated cards while punch card systems typically required the voter to punch out a pre-perforated rectangle (“chad”) from the card using a stylus. Because of this difference, Datavote systems tended to be more accurate than other punch card systems. However, Datavote systems were historically used by approximately 8-10 times fewer registered voters than the pre-perforated punch card systems.
After 2000, legislators scrambled quickly to try to prevent another Florida-like debacle from happening, and the resulting 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) represented the first time the federal government truly became involved in election administration – which is a state’s responsibility – by establishing some minimum standards. It also provided the money and impetus for upgrading voting systems, which as a result are now predominantly one of the two major types described next.
Optical mark-sense scanners are a ballot tabulation technology whose origins are in the world of standardized testing (like the SAT and ACT). You probably knew these better as “Scantron” sheets. When first used for counting ballots in 1962 in Kern City, California, they were tremendously unwieldy systems (that one in particular weighed 15,000 pounds). In the late 1960s and 1970s they shrunk down in size and became easier to operate. By the 1996 general election, optical mark-sense scan systems were used by more than 1/5th of registered voters. Their popularity continues to grow today – in fact, even more so in 2008 due to recent backlash against DRE systems. Most absentee or mail-in ballots are of this type.
Proposed Optical Scan Ballot (source: Design for Democracy)
Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines – what we typically think of today as electronic or computer voting systems, usually with touch screens – were first used in real elections in 1975 in Streamwood and Woodstock, Illinois. Used by only 12.6% of registered voters in the 2000 general election, they quickly became more widely adopted after the issues in Florida and as soon as funding became available through HAVA. That legislation gave states incentives in the amount of $3.9 billion to replace punch card and lever machines with newer technology. The main vendors of voting machines at that time were aggressively marketing their touch screen machines, pitching their better legibility, fast tabulation, and improved accessibility for the blind, paralyzed, and foreign language speakers. So, without much guidance or a lot of resources at their disposal, state and local governments and election officials began buying them.
DRE Voting Machine (source: Smithsonian)
Unfortunately, these types of DRE machines have witnessed a number of well-publicized problems – particularly during the elections of 2004 and 2006 – including high costs, poor usability, high error rates, lack of testing, vulnerability to hacking, lack of transparency, and often a lack of an auditable paper trail. Consequently, there has been a national swing back toward paper-based voting in 2008, as can be seen in the figure below.
Type of Voting Equipment Available to Registered Voters
Conclusion
A whole lot of change has occurred in voting technology in the past two centuries, and especially since 2000. The predominance of paper ballots for optical scanning machines and the recent problems with DRE machines suggests that the public (as well as election officials wishing to avoid embarrassment) feels most comfortable at this time with the tangibility of paper ballots, which are generally intuitive and more familiar to the average voter than touch screen DREs.
Regardless of the type of voting technology used, no system is perfect, and errors will occur. Sure, some technologies are probably more reliable than others, but we think the key point here is that the voting technology used for marking and casting a ballot represents only one small piece of the voter experience in the larger voting process. A lot of excellent work has been done already on ballot design and usability guidelines for that part of the experience occurring on or around Election Day.
Unfortunately, not enough of that guidance has been heeded to date. With today’s DRE voting machines, we continue to see some of the common design mistakes that cause people to have bad experiences with software:
Not speaking the users language
Lack of appropriate feedback
Lack of consistency
Not providing the user enough control
Bad error messages
Not being efficient to use
However, equally (if not more) important to the functioning of elections are the people, processes, and infrastructure that also comprise the “election ecosystem.” We’ll talk more about that, as well as some of the relevant social and communication technologies that are changing the voter’s experience before and on Election Day, in our next installment.
Stay tuned for “Part 2: User Needs, Usability, and the Larger Voting Process”
Like most people (presumably), we at Artefact have us some serious Election Fever! Nervous with anticipation and wishing for the most directly participatory part of the democratic process (i.e., citizens voting for their leaders and representatives) to play out with as little voter suppression and electoral fraud as possible, we found the following sketch from Fred Armisen at Saturday Night Live to be a welcome and much-needed dose of comic relief:
Surely, you all can appreciate the SNL folks’ lighthearted jab at CNN’s John King, cable television’s reigning wizard of the Perceptive Pixel multitouch display. His skills with tapping, panning, zooming, rotating, and coloring are indeed formidable, but we can’t help but think that sometimes he just likes to monkey around.
As big advocates of surface computing and natural user interfaces, we know that multitouch surfaces and displays lend themselves to many wonderful moments of surprise and delight. Besides enabling powerful, new experiences which allow us to manipulate all kinds of data and media in order to better understand information and be incredibly productive, these impressive technologies can be a lot of fun too.
But - on a more sober note - there are certain times and places for fun, and there are others where we need technology and systems to perform their functions accurately, reliably, and intuitively for all possible users.
Like in the voting booth, for example.
According to Clive Thompson, “new voting technologies tend to emerge out of crises of confidence.” In 2000, we experienced such a crisis with the infamous “hanging chad” debacle in Florida. Since then, government and election officials have scrambled to avoid similar disasters by investing in technology “upgrades.” But so far, these experiments aren’t making anyone feel any better. Electronic touchscreen voting systems are falling out of favor, and this November’s general election is showing a significant shift back to paper ballots and optical scan technologies.
In the upcoming days, we will share our thoughts on how technology has shaped the voter experience, not just in the actual or figurative “booth,” but in the months or years before and the days or weeks after. We’ll take a brief look back at where we’ve been, then look ahead to what might be in the year 2028. We will speculate on how trends in technology, society, and culture may affect the future of the voting process – from the moment citizens register and become involved in educating themselves, to participating actively in democracy, to what happens when votes are being counted and results are being reported.
We believe the voter experience will become more user-centered (it already has, to some extent, with things like mail-in and early voting), but how exactly? Will the next generation voter experience be limited to outside the polling place or inside as well? Will the polling place be physical or virtual? Will Americans be voting online following Estonia’s lead? Will we add more transparency to the process by creating open-source code for our voting machines like the Aussies have already done? Will we cast our votes using RFID or via text message? Will it all be telepathic?!
In the meantime, though we still have dumb or suspicious machines recording our votes and possibly illegal efforts to purge voter rolls, do the Web 2.0 thing and participate, co-create, mash it up, get social, and monitor and capture your experiences (but check your state laws to make sure you aren’t breaking them!). Here are some suggestions:
by Gabriel Biller, posted November 19th, 2008
