Resources > voting and e-voting user experience: US

Voting - including electronic voting - user experience resources related to the United States, including design, usability, accessibility and security of both old and new technologies.

Official reports
Independent reports and expert resource sites
Usability and design
Security
Organisations
Articles in the press (2002-2004)

Return to main e-voting page for access to resources about other countries.

Official US reports

California Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force Report

California Internet Voting Task Force: Technical Committee Recommendations

California Secretary of State's directives on touch screen voting systems

Federation Election Commission Voting Systems Standards
Published 2002. Includes a section on usability of voting systems.

Congressional Research Service Report on Election Reform and Electronic
Voting Systems (DREs): Analysis of Security Issues (PDF)
Published November 2003.

Federal Election Commission: Usability Guides for Voting Systems

NIST report: Improving the Usability and Accessibility of Voting Systems and Products. (from the Election Assistance Commission website home page) Published April 2004.

RL30773: Voting Technologies in the United States: Overview and Issues for Congress
Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for the US Congress by Eric A. Fischer

Independent reports and expert resource sites

ACM's position statement on voting systems.
The ACM is the largest computing organisation in the world.

ACM: Communications of the ACM special issue on voting systems.
Published October 2004.
(Access to texts requires ACM digital library subscription.)

Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project
The links page has US resources.

Electronic Frontier Foundation 'E-voting' Archive
Also contains many resources on e-participation.

Evoting Experts
A new website run by a number of US academics, including Avi Rubin, David Dill and Barbara Simons.

Lorrie Cranor's website
A wealth of materials on e-voting.

Rebecca Mercuri's electronic voting website
Rebecca Mercuri has done considerable research in the field of electronic voting and her website contains a wealth of resources. She is particulary concerned about the security issues surrounding e-voting, and is in favour of non-electronic audit trails.

Peter Neumann's website on computer-related elections.

Usability Professionals' Association Voting and Usability Project.

Verified Voting
A website from US computing academic David Dill. David has been mounting a campaign among computing and other academics in the States to implement verified voting (i.e. paper-based audit trails).

Voting and Elections
A very large collection of material and expert commentary put together by Doug Jones of the University of Iowa. If you want to look in one place to find out all the background and bring you bang up to date, look here. Jones is a computer scientist.

Voting in Massachusetts - Report from Caltech/MTI Voting Project (PDF)

Usability and design

Design for Democracy
A project of the US design association AIGA. The website has a good online resource of case studies.

Disenfranchised by Design
An interesting paper from Susan King Roth, explaining many of the usability problems with US voting systems. Includes a number of photographs of voters using equipment (originally published in Information Design Journal, 1998).
[link to local copy]

Electronic voting systems usability issues
Bederson, Lee, Sherman, Herrnson & Niemi (2002)
A usability study carried out on direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, with methods including expert review and field studies.
There are more papers on voting technology and ballot design on the same website. This team has now obtained National Science Foundation grant funding to pursue further research co-ordinated by Peter Francia at the University of Maryland. An interesting feature is its cross-disciplinary nature: researchers are to include social scientists and computer scientists.

Federal Election Commission: Usability Guides for Voting Systems (also now available from the Election Assistance Commission publications page)

IEEE - Voting Equipment Standards - Accessibility and Usability Task Group

NIST report: Improving the Usability and Accessibility of Voting Systems and Products. (from the Election Assistance Commission website home page) Published April 2004.

Usability Analysis of the Palm Beach Ballot Controversy by Paul Resnick of the University of Michigan.

Usability Professionals' Association Voting and Usability Project
Whitney Quesenbery is leading this UPA project studying e-voting usability. Plenty of resources on usability and user-centred design of voting.

Visible Politics Project, Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. The site has a large amount of downloadable material.

Voting and Usability: Lessons from the 2000 Presidential Election
Whitney Quesenbery is a fellow member of the Usability Professionals' Association (in the US) and also involved in the US Society for Technical Communication (STC). Since the furore over Florida's 'butterfly ballots', the UPA has been involved in research into the usability of voting systems.
See also: What Don't We Know About Internet Voting and Usability

Voting, Computers and the Human-Computer Interface
A collection of materials put together by Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility.

The Ballot Ballet: The Usability of Accessible Voting Machines
A piece by Darren Burton and Mark Uslan published in Access World, July 2004.

Oops! They forgot the usability: elections as a case study
by Whitney Quesenbery
Presented at Michigan State University, October 2004.

Defining a Summative Usability Test for Voting Systems
by Whitney Quesenbery, from a workshop held at the UPA annual conference, Minneapolis, 2004.

Security

Black Box Voting
These differing acounts of Diebold's e-voting machines and software practices in Georgia, from the website of Bev Harris, make for disturbing reading. Some background about the Harris materials on this site is available from Doug Jones's University of Iowa site - this seems to suggest Harris's materials are authentic, but Harris nevertheless remains a controversial figure. (added December 2002)

Johns Hopkins study:
Rubin, A., Stubblefield, A., Kohno, T. & Wallach, D.S. (2003) Analysis of an Electronic Voting System (PDF)
Diebold 'technical response' to the Johns Hopkins study
Johns Hopkins response to Diebold's response
Critique of the original paper from Rebecca Mercuri
Response to Diebold's technical response from Doug Jones from the University of Iowa Department of Computer Science
Maryland's September 2003 response to the Johns Hopkins study, prepared by SAIC (Science Applications International): Risk Assessment Report (PDF, 1.2MB)

Trusted Agent Report: Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System
A report from RABA Technologies for the State of Maryland (January 2004)

A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) by David Jefferson, Avi Rubin, Barbara Simons and David Wagner (20 January 2004)
A report criticising the proposed implementation of remote Internet voting for US service personnel based overseas.

Recommendations for Improving Reliability of Direct Recording Electronic Voting Systems
Report from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Brennan Center for Justice (29 June 2004)

Communications of the ACM (CACM) special issue on e-voting (October 2004)
Contents only accessible by ACM digital library subscribers.
Most of the articles in this special issue concern security aspects of e-voting.

Organisations

ACM
The Association for Computing Machinery, the largest professional secotr organisation in the world, works on e-voting issues as part of public policy agenda. This page summarises these activities and links to material addressing initiatives from ACM.
Following consultation across its membership, the ACM announced a position statement against paperless electronic voting (28 September):
http://www.acm.org/usacm/weblog/index.php?p=73

Design for Democracy, Chicago
An offshoot of AIGA, DfD aims to improve the election experience for users, and has been instrumental in achieving improved design in election materials in the Chicago area. DfD is now seeking to disseminate know-how to other areas of the US.

Elections Assistance Commission
Established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), "the Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource for information and review of procedures with respect to the administration of Federal elections".
The EAC is now pushing forward initiatives such as the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), which has a usability respresentative, Whitney Quesenbery. (Announced 17 June 2004)

Federal Election Commission
Note that individual states also have their own election commissions or boards.

IEEE
The IEEE Voting Equipment Standards (Project 1583) includes a Task Group on Usability and Accessibility. Draft documents are available online.
IEEE is a worldwide body of professional electronic and electrical engineers, widely involved in the international standards-setting process.
Accessibility and Usability Task Group
Main Voting Equipment Standards page

Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology

My Vote Counts
Page of the California Task Force, formed to respond to concerns over the security of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines and the related issue of the value of a paper trail.

NIST Voting Site: NIST and the Help America Vote Act
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has key role in helping to realize nationwide improvements in voting systems by January 2006.

Open Voting Consortium
A nonprofit group working on a secure e-voting machine based on an open-source software platform.

Usability Professionals' Association
As part of its Voting & Usability Project, the UPA is launching a register of usability practitioners for voting usability, at the request of the US authorities.

Articles in the press

2002

Debugging Maryland Balloting (12 May 2002) a short article looking at some of the problems - including usability problems - of voting machines in Maryland

Expert says Palm Beach's New Voting Machines are Flawed (Jill Barton, Associated Press, 21 August 2002)

2003

High-tech Voting Raises Questions (Insight magazine, 13 January 2003)

New voting systems assailed (Washington Post, 28 March 2003)

Voting Suit Gains Momentum Report on the escalation of a US case, involving a California resident who alleges touch-screen voting machines are open to manipulation and consequently deprive citizens of their constitutional rights. The case involves Sequoia Voting Systems technology and revolves around the absence of an audit trail. (Wired, 5 August 2003)

Erlich orders voting system security study (Washington Post, 7 August 2003) - the fallout beings from the Johns Hopkins study.

Jolted over electronic voting (Washington Post, 11 August 2003)

Maryland E-voting Passes Muster (Wired, 25 September 2003)

Voters skeptical of e-voting systems (USA Today, 8 October 2003)

Touch screens worry voters (Miami Herald, 10 November 2003)

Vote marred by computer woes (Indianapolis Star, 9 November 2003)

Ohio halts e-voting machines (Wired, 3 December 2003)
"The state's top elections official said Tuesday that security problems found in new touch-screen voting systems mean they won't be in place statewide in time for the November 2004 presidential election."

No confidence vote: Why the current touch screen voting fiasco was pretty much inevitable (Robert Cringely, 4 December 2003)

Considering Computer Voting (New York Times, 15 December 2003)

2004

Federal remote voting system called flawed (CNN, 22 January 2004)

Pentagon cans Internet voting system (The Register, 6 February 2004)
Online voting canceled for Americans overseas (New York Times, 6 February 2004, registration required)

Hi-tech voting machines 'threaten' US polls (The Guardian, 16 February 2004)
E-voting terminals face Super Tuesday test (29 February 2004)

The (design) fix is in (Chicago Tribune, 16 March 2004)
An account of voting material redesign in Chicago and Cook County

The Age of E-Voting (Newsweek International, 28 March 2004)

Budgets, mandates slow adoption of e-voting (Washington Technology, 31 March 2004)

Pentagon Drops Plan To Test Internet Voting (Washington Post, 31 March 2004) - registration required
The entire SERVE experiment is now off, following the critical report published by four computer scientists.

Chads are gone, but Florida faces new voting foul-up fears (Observer, 18 April 2004) - "We have a large number of folks who are elderly and just not comfortable with these machines".

Voting panel grills Diebold (CNet, 21 April 2004) - report on the California's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel investigation into Diebold

California votes against Diebold (CNet, 22 April 2004) - further coverage of the California state election officials' investigation into Diebold voting machines. They have recommended that certain machines be banned, and may pursue legal action against the company.

E-voting promises US election tragicomedy (The Register, 10 May 2004)

The Tabulator (Washington Post, 22 May 2004) - an article about Theresa LePore, the Florida election official behind the design of the 'butterfly ballot' in Palm Beach County.

E-voting security: looking good on paper? (The Register, 7 July 2004)

E-voting security: getting it right (The Register, 8 July 2004)

Analysis reveals flaws in voting by touch-screen (Florida Sun-Sentinel, 11 July)
Touch-screen systems purchased in Florida have not performed as well as paper ballots counted by optical scanner, according to this report.
Companion article: How we gathered our data

Disaster puts kink in election planning (Southwest Florida News-Press, 16 August) reports on how hurricane damage could affect the primary.

The New Hanging Chads (New York Times, 19 August, subscription required)

Techies Praised for E-Vote Work (Wired, 20 August) looks at the relationships between the US Election Assitance Commission, IEEE and the rest of the techies. Despite what the article says, participation by vendors in the standards process is (a) widespread and considered normal, across technologies, and (b) much less dominant in the e-voting arena than in other areas.

E-Vote Machines: Secret Testing (Wired, 22 August) reports on the firms responsible for voting technology certification.

Ballot arrows point out new controversy (Miami Herald, 23 August) reports on on usability issues with the Palm Beach Countee absentee (postal) ballot.

California green lights e-voting (The Register, 25 August) briefly reports on developments from the California state certification process.

Poll: Voters Want Paper Trail (Wired, 25 August) reports the results of various public opinion surveys.

Florida heads into e-voting storm (The Register, 31 August)

E-vote Recount Rule in Dispute (Wired, 31 August)

Vote Swaps Revamped for 2004 (Wired, 1 September) reports that websites are springing up to enable vote pairing in the US election.

Shades of 2000: Elections boss loses in recount (Miami Herald, 2 September)
"Theresa LePore lost her job as Palm Beach supervisor of elections Wednesday morning. Then the county did another recount, this time of absentee ballots..."

Activists Find More E-Vote Flaws (Wired News, 22 September)
A report on allegations from Bev Harris.

Electronic-Vote Critics Urge Changes to System (Reuters/Yahoo News, 22 September)

Touchscreen Hack Effort Called 'Monkey Business' (Fox News, 23 September)
"Critics of the Diebold touch-screen voting machines turned their attention Wednesday from the machines themselves to the computers that will tally the final vote, saying the outcome is so easy to manipulate that even a monkey could do it. And they showed video of a monkey hacking the system to prove it...."

E-Vote Fears Soar in Swing States (Wired News, 23 September)
More on Bev Harris and the monkeys.

Still Seeking a Fair Florida Vote (Washington Post, 27 September)
An article by Jimmy Carter, who has become an international elections monitoring specialist in recent years.

Florida will not play fair (The Guardian, 28 September)
Another piece by Jimmy Carter on the same subject, this time for the UK press.

Paperless e-voting gets thumbs down from ACM (NetworkWorldFusion, 28 September)
Coverage of the Association for Computing Machinery's new statement on paperless electronic voting.

The Bombay Ballot (Slate, 29 September 2004)
An article comparing the US and developing world experiences of e-voting.

What happens when we vote? (Open Democracy, 5 October 2004)
First article in a new series at Open Democracy.

Experts Knock e-Voting Data Delay (10 October 2004)
Wired continues its series of stories on the US elections and technology. US academics have complained that data collected in Michigan from an Internet voting exercise conducted by the Democrats back in February has not been released.

Diebold and the Disabled (Wired, 12 October 2004)

Whom do you trust to count your vote? (Open Democracy, 12 October 2004)

Counties try to work out kinks: Formats are clearer but still have problems, experts say (Orlando Sentinel, 23 October) (free registration required)
An in-depth look at usability problems with a number of ballot designs, with extensive commentary from interaction designer Karen Schriver.

Voter Alert Line data (MSNBC)
Data gathered from callers to the Voter Alert Line. Click on the Calls By Voting System link (top right) to get a breakdown by voting technology.

E-Voting Tests Get Failing Grade (Wired, 1 November 2004)
Addresses certification of voting machines.

Pols, Don't Count on Recounts (Wired, 2 November 2004)

More than 4,500 North Carolina votes lost because of mistake in voting machine capacity (USA Today, 4 November 2004)
Some machines don't stop accepting votes when they run out of space to store ballots.

Watchdogs Spot E-Vote Glitches (Wired, 2 November 2004)
David Dill points to the importance of voter intention, and yet another vendor blames users for the shortcomings of their machines.

E-voting's prospects are dim (Reuters via Cnet, 8 November 2004)
This article is actually about Internet voting, not e-voting.

New Standards for Elections (New York Times, 8 November 2004)
The NYT continues its series on voting and elections with this call for an end to the random differences across counties and states in the way elections are conducted.

Return to main e-voting page.

Return to main Resources page.