Feature: Click ... um ... about Here to Vote...

There are many reasons why electronic voting is a bad idea. But I’m not going to talk about all of them here, you can explore a good many at http://www.free-project.org/learn/. Seeing as this is Usability News I thought it would be appropriate to focus on the problems associated with actually using e-voting systems.

A citizen can e-vote on many different types of hardware ranging from the custom-built to the bog standard. Custom systems are specially constructed kiosks known in the US as DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines. These consist of rows of buttons or buttons and touchscreen or just a touchscreen. Unfortunately the ones with buttons aren't so well thought out. When she was last in London the US e-voting expert Rebecca Mercuri told me over a beer about a voting machine which had a green button in the lower right-hand corner, a logical place for a 'next page' button. In fact, pushing this button finished your voting session - there was no way to get back to the previous screens once you'd made the mistake. The result was that hardly anyone voted on anything other than the first contest... The 'next page' button was actually on the touch-screen.

The actual design of the buttons can leave a lot to be desired too... they can be hard to push, tough to see which candidate they are for or just plain faulty. In the wonderful world of touchscreens where we aren't limited by the physical constraints of real buttons, there are also minefields lurking. We all know that using touchscreen systems is an inexact science, fingers are big and greasy, resulting in smudgy insensitive screens. To help, voting suppliers make the onscreen buttons a generous size, but unfortunately the result is that you can only fit a small number of candidates on the screen.

This is where we enter a whole world of pain. Unlike paper, digital screens are logically infinite but actually much more physically limited – big bits of paper don't cost that much, big screens do – ever lusted after an Apple Cinema Display then looked at the price? Thus we need to scroll, but we unfortunately cannot assume any level of computer expertise from voters, so how do we do this? Use a non-standard system or plug in a mouse? As you can imagine every supplier has tried something different so we have ended up with scroll buttons on the screens, roller-balls built into kiosks, scroll buttons on the kiosk, mice and more.

It's just plain confusing dealing with all these and candidates don't like it one bit: they're sure those 'below the fold' of the screen will suffer and I find it hard to disagree. Mastering scrolling on these systems could be more than voters can be bothered with.

An example of the problems being faced by voters is provided by the University of Maryland's review of Diebold's AccuVote-TS system (a touchscreen system that has become the centre of considerable controversy for not only poor usability design, but astoundingly weak security). The university's report found that:
* the system used inconsistent and confusing terminology,
* instructions were unclear and unnecessarily long,
* no help button was available while voting,
* layout had significant room for improvement and the graphics did not contrast well or were confusing,
* some basic error checks were not done to prevent invalid ballots being cast, and
* irrelevant and distracting management information was also presented during the vote.

The audio voting feature, one of the proclaimed accessibility benefits of introducing such systems, was heavily criticized. And, even though the academics only had two machines to test, one, in their words, 'exhibited catastrophic failure'. Not a great report card.

I don't want to pick on just the custom voting machines though... You can also vote from your own home computer or even your mobile phone.

Let's start with the phone: the entire interface is based on typing in long numbers to identify yourself, your chosen candidate and confirm your actions. Typing numbers in SMS is tedious, error prone and certainly not disability friendly.

Secondly it becomes completely unworkable when you consider a voting system more complex than first past the post. How on earth will preference voting work? It's hard enough on a dedicated voting machine! The other problem with SMS voting is that the carriers do not guarantee delivery of messages – so there's a good chance, particularly on a busy day, that vote messages or the confirmation reply won't get through. There's little user support you can provide in the form of error messages or contextual help when you're working with such simple devices using an even simpler protocol. I find it hard to believe SMS voting is sensible from a usability or security perspective. But remember kids, it looks cool!

Voting from home computers is also problematic. I've seen dozens of non-standard interface widgets bodged together out of JavaScript with bizarre or non-existent error messages if you do something wrong. Some online votes have even tried to insist on certain types of browser (no prizes for guessing which). The suppliers have got better at providing wider browser compatibility but nevertheless requirements at the last local election pilots for certain types of SSL encryption and supporting specific HTML standards forced some voters to download huge updates or find another way to vote. Such voters are unlikely to feel that e-voting has made things easier for them.

Clearly all of these problems are fixable. A professional approach to usability would resolve most of the issues raised in a short time, though of course this would still leave the major security and privacy concerns to be addressed.

But we can't be particularly confident that a more dedicated commitment to usability is forthcoming. The Electoral Commission's recent report on this year's voting pilots admitted a lack of any formal testing to ensure that requirements were met by suppliers. Even acceptance testing was not properly performed, documented or even defined in the suppliers' contracts. Electronic voting looks set to remain a hit and miss affair for some time to come.

Jason Kitcat (jeep@free-project.org) is founder and coordinator of the free e-democracy project (http://www.free-project.org) which advocates the responsible use of Free Software in government. He is also a doctoral student at SPRU (Science & Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex. His personal website is http://www.j-dom.org

Associated Link: More on evoting

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