November 7th. Today, myself and millions of other Americans voted in the mid-term elections, expressing our views on candidates and for states with propositions such as California, deciding on laws that could take affect in as soon as ten days. I’m not here to write about my political opinions or thoughts on candidates; friends know that I’m liberal and because of my dual nationality, a proponent of state assistance. I’m writing tonight to just present a hopefully unbiased perspective on my first time voting in person at a polling place. True, I had voted two years ago in the 2004 Presidential Elections but this was through an absentee ballet which was convenient and provided me with plenty of time to understand the ballot and choices. Today, I voted electronically in my new “home” state, California.
I left work half an hour early today to vote locally in Mountain View. The polling place was close by, held in a community room in a well lit and easily accessible apartment building, no doubt in an effort to follow ADA guidelines. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the polling place had opened early at 7 am and would continue to be open until 8 pm, providing myself and other voters with an ample 13 hours to find time to vote. I was greeted by an assembly line of four workers, each with a simple role.
The first worker asked for my name and verified that it appeared in the registration books. He asked that I sign my name and write in my address and handed me over to the following worker. Here, the worker found my voter number and provided it to the third worker who provided me with an electronic voter registration card. The final worker thanked me for doing my civic duty and I joined the line of voters as we waited for one of five electronic voting machines to become available. As I was waiting, I realized I had never been asked for any form of identification. Instead, the workers relied on the fact that I knew where I was assigned to vote and that I could provide correctly my mailing address. What would have stopped an individual who had seen my voter registration card from appearing as myself, hoping that I would just not vote today. While I realize requiring all voters to have a form of government issued ID is difficult and potentially unconstitutional given the financial barrier needed to have one, the current system relies too much on trust. It doesn’t take much effort to thwart an individual from voting and simply having someone else impersonate them.
After about ten minutes of waiting, it was finally my time to vote on what I believe to be a Diebold AccuVote touch screen machine. Disregarding for the moment the controversy of voting on a machine created by a private corporation, running a closed-source propriety operating system, I was intrigued and looking forward to being one of the 16 million voters in the United States using an electronic polling machine. The voting began by inserting the smart card given to me earlier in the process. After being read, I was presented with five different languages and urged to select my native tongue. English was the first choice, as it should be, but I did wonder how the other four languages were ordered and why only five were available. Most likely, this was due to logistics as I believe in California, all voting information sent to us by the state and local government has to be available in these official languages. But, given that this is an electronic machine, why couldn’t they include more languages?
The voting itself was fairly straightforward. Eighteen pages with two questions on each one, navigated by clicking through each screen and then pressing ‘Next’ to progress. There was a button to increase text size and at any point, you could review your votes and go back. However, as a college-educated software engineer, I did have a problem. It took me several minutes to figure out how to change one of my votes. The issue was fairly simple: for each candidate or proposition that had yet to be voted on, the available choices were marked with a target that when pressed, would be replaced with a green check mark. At this point, the other targets disappeared from the question and as far as I was concerned, it appeared that the question had gone from being mutable to immutable. As I gathered, the idea is that as you progress through the screens, you’re essentially removing targets until when you finish, each question has a sole check mark next to the choice you’ve selected, providing a clear indicator that you’ve completed the task.
Because of the next and previous buttons, it was evident how I could return back to a previous screen and review a question. In fact, there were multiple ways to return to the question with the most convenient method simply by choosing the review button and then selecting the answer I wanted to change. But at this point, I was confused. There were no targets on the screen nor was there an edit button for a completed question. Instead, you were presented with the question and the choice you had selected with the check mark. Slightly fearful that I might mess up, I was very apprehensive to just click around the screen in hopes of making the question editable again. In the end, it turned out that you had to select your previous vote by clicking on the check mark to make the question editable. The check mark remained but the targets were brought back. Now, it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out but I would have preferred to have a clear, simple button that would allow me to return the targets next to each candidate as at least personally, I didn’t find this intuitive. I’m sure however if I hadn’t figured this out, I could have asked those working at the polling place for assistance.
The voting ended by having you review your choices on-screen and then afterwards, on paper by viewing the printout attached to the voting machine. Here once again I found myself slightly worried. The printout was behind a darkened screen which provided privacy. However, the printout wasn’t well lit, relying on the light from the polling place to make it possible to read the dark text behind the darkened glass screen. I had some difficulties reading the text and I can imagine the elderly having even more difficulty. Would it have been too difficult for them to have included a light shining down on the printout to make it easier to read. It would need to be on only in this final stage and could be dim, providing just enough light to make the letters and choices clear.
Because of the large number of candidates and propositions, it took three printouts from the machine to confirm all my votes. I did appreciate the paper trail but there was one final disconcerting moment during the voting. Once you’d verified the printout, the machine ejected your voter registration card and instructed you to return the card. However, there was a delay of what felt like 30 seconds before the printout scrolled out of view from the next candidate. Given that the line of voters was perhaps only a few footsteps away from the machines, it was entirely plausible that a voter could leave as soon as the card was ejected and provide ample time for the next voter to situate themselves at the machine and see the tail end of the previous voters choices. This goes against the fundamentals of voting: your vote is private. Because of this paper trail and delay in hiding the paper, this privacy could be breached. Needless to say, I waited until the paper had fully scrolled out of view before giving up the machine. Had I been less anal, I’m sure the next voter would have seen how I had voted on Proposition C, which if passed, will provide Mountain View officials with an increase in their civic salary.
All in all, it was an interesting experience and I felt good afterwards. Would I vote electronically again? Most probably as I believe the machines when working properly are fair and unbiased. Their bright screens, multiple languages, and ability to change your vote at a touch of a button provide convenience that paper ballots can not. But, I’m leery. The experience wasn’t perfect and in this brief write up, four problems arose. I’m sure if you take a closer look at the whole voting process, there are probably many other areas that could use improvement. I doubt that there will ever be a seamless, uncontroversial voting system but in the end, given our reliance on computers there is no doubt electronic voting will become the norm.
Just clicked through and finally an update. I had given up, frankly. But how intriguing.
This year for the first time I completely forgot to vote. Ok so it was only for a local council election, but I was gutted, will Jess ever speak to me again… then again as an anarchist perhaps she doesn’t vote?
I was a bit surprised that you seemed to be advocating an identity card, or were you just suggesting a bit of paper like the postcard that gets sent out here in the UK?
Will you be in France this Christmas, I will be there for a while? I imagine that now you are working at Apple, you will be on the US two weeks holidays a year, so probably not.
All the best
Chaz on November 24th, 2006 at 06:42 am
Is this blog now dead?
Chaz on March 26th, 2007 at 11:47 am
You do realize that California is also 3,000 miles away from New York, right?
What’s next? Hawaii?
Gruen on April 21st, 2007 at 03:01 am
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I didn’t need to change any votes, but I also was left…dissatisfied with their UI. I bet they thought they should hide the other checkboxes to increase feedback that the vote was accepted, as if the check mark wasn’t enough.
My biggest problem, though, was finding how to actually cast my ballot! I expected it to be a clear jump, like reviewing your order from Amazon before accepting charges. Alas, you were expected to arrow through the review first. I guess it was clear, arrow to the right means proceed to the next step…but I would have preferred a “Review remaining items” button
Josh on November 8th, 2006 at 04:56 am