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: