Democrats: pre-marked ballots in Nevada:
Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County’s electronic voting machines.
Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked.
Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.
“Something’s not right,” Ferrara said. “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”
The voting machine technicians? SEIU employees. What could possibly go wrong?
The get-out-the-vote effort? Reads just like a conservative’s wisecrack.
Isolated incident? Nope:
A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.
Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.
“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”
M. Ray Wood, Craven County Board of elections chairman, issued a written statement saying that the elections board is aware of isolated issues and that in each case the voter was able to cast his or her ballot as desired.
And between Hennepin and Ramsey County along we have 75 charges of voter fraud from 2008. That’s 1/4 of Al Franken’s margin of victory, in counties totaling 10% of Minnesota’s population.
But remember – according to the DFL, all of you who want to bring integrity back to our election system are racist thugs.
Helps keep things in perspective, doesn’t it?
This is just BEGGING for a lawsuit after the election, especially if it’s close. The number of unmarked ballots, those with “hanging chad” and the like is quite high, so care to guess if the lawyers will get frisky after any election that’s NOT a blowout?
At least one of the voting machine problems in Nevada was due to this:
Younger users will touch the screen and release immediately. Older users (especially if they’re inexperienced) may touch and then linger, and when a new option comes up, they may inadvertently select it.
In this case, it seems like the user had picked English, and held his finger on the screen long enough that Reid’s name came up and the system registered that he had selected Reid.
Now, this is a fault in the system, to be sure, but if I were the designer and I saw that happening, I would probably say, “well, it’s not actually voting for the guy, and putting in more logic to prevent this could introduce more bugs, like possibly make it not register a touch when it should.” So I would probably have left it working like that because, as an ethical professional, it’s more important to me that it *works* rather than whether it seems to be doing something suspicious.
Generally, we’re going to see problems like this because HID is hard to do. Keep in mind that Apple, a company that has a reputation for carefully polished interfaces and has some very expensive testing facilities, still managed to release a phone that would lose signal if held the wrong way.
And with voting it’s even more difficult: you’ve got millions of people, so they will do everything you can imagine to that system and it has to divine the “right thing” every time.
I think we can get these systems working pretty smoothly given a few more iterations. And, keep in mind, paper ballots have given us such wonderful things as Senator Al Franken.
Scoob,
I’m a usability guy. And as I read the literature on the development of electronic voting machines, I was struck at how little time and money the developers budgeted for usability work on electronic voting machines.
And, for that matter, paper ballots. When I was teaching a web content development class, I had my students run a heuristic usability evaluation on the infamous “Butterfly Ballot” from the 2000 election. HUGE problems – the sort of thing a good usabilty person would catch on the first take, that cause immense problems.
The problems you describe are the kind of thing that we catch – if we’re brought onto the project.
But, largely (as I am given to understand it) we were not.
But, largely […] we were not.
Engineers aren’t famous for being high on UI design, it being one of those things that tends to get cut in the rush to finish the project to some PM’s unrealistic schedule.
Not that there isn’t a strong disapproval of those who aren’t interested in thinking like technologists among technologists. Perhaps you’ve heard this one, in a Foxworthy voice?
“You might be a sysadmin if you see a bumper sticker that says USERS ARE LOSERS and not realize it’s about drugs.”
That was about drugs? That driver wasn’t a BOFH? Dang!