Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot

by Paul S. Herrnson

Voting difficulties hung over America's presidential election in 2000 like a dark cloud. Hanging chads, a butterfly ballot, and the Supreme Court remain the most vivid memories of that political donnybrook. Passage of 2002's Help America Vote Act sparked further interest in the physical process of casting a ballot, yet several recent contests still produced confusion at the polls. A solution to at least some of those problems may be found in new technology, but such innovations carry their own concerns and questions. V oting Technology is the first book to investigate in a scientific and authoritative manner how voters respond to the new equipment. The authors—an interdisciplinary group of experts in American elections, political behavior, human-computer interaction, and human factors psychology—assess five commercially available voting systems, each one representing a specific class based on shared design principles, as well as a prototype system not currently available. They evaluate the systems against different criteria (including ease of use, speed, and accuracy) using field experiments, laboratory experiments, and expert reviews. The results reveal the good and bad about the new systems, including specific features that contribute to clarity, confusion, or error. Going beyond the concern with spoiled ballots, they determine whether voters actually cast their ballots for the candidates they intended to support. They address fundamental questions of whether voters like and trust the equipment and whether the various systems are equally usable by all voters. Their research also opens up an entirely new line of inquiry by asking about the interaction between ballot format and voter behavior. The concluding chapter pulls together best practices that will guide manufacturers of voting systems, ballot designers, election officials, political observers, and of course, voters. In a political system based on free exercise of personal choice, the least w

215 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 4 out of 5]

For decades, voting technology consisted of paper ballots that were hand-counted. Then, we started using special ballot formats to enable machine-counting. In principle, with the widespread availability of the Internet and advances in digital authentication, we should be able to vote on-line, bypassing the need for voting precincts, paper ballots (or voting machines), and vote-counting gadgets, but lack of trust in the reliability and security of digital systems and concerns about access and fairness have prevented this ideal from materializing.

This book covers variations in and issues surrounding voting technology in 7 chapters and 3 appendices, as follows:

1. The Study of Electronic Voting

2. A New Generation of Voting Systems

3. Voter Reaction to Electronic Voting Systems

4. The Accuracy of Electronic Voting Systems

5. Inequality in the Voting Booth

6. Vote Verification Systems

7. Toward More User-Friendly Voting and Election Systems

A. Voter Information Guides and Questionnaires

B. Characteristics of Respondents in the Field Studies

C. Regression Results for Chapters 5 and 6

As paper or on-screen ballots have grown in size and complexity, automating the process of casting ballots, tallying votes, and validating the results have become more urgent. None of these aspects is trivial in an election with millions of voters and dozens of candidates. Equally urgent is introduction of standards to engender familiarity and voter education to avoid errors and intimidation (which can hamper participation).

The voting system (plurality, run-off, rank-ordering, Borda, and so on) is a different story, but whichever system is chosen through societal consensus, adhering to the rules and executing it in a transparent and trustworthy manner is essential. Perhaps we will see reforms in voting technology within our lifetime, but widespread adoption of new technologies is always challenging.