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Crowd Sourcing Polling Place Wait Times – Part 2

Last time, we wrote about the idea of a voter information service where people could crowd source the data about polling place wait times, so that other voters would benefit by not going when the lines are getting long, and so that news media and others could get a broad view of how well or poorly a county or state was doing in terms of voting time. And as we observed such would be a fine idea, but the results from that crowd-sourced reporting would be way better if the reporting were not on the “honor system.”  Without going on a security and privacy rampage, it would be better if this idea were implemented using some existing model for people to do mobile computing voter-stuff, in a way that is not trivial to abuse, unlike the honor system.

Now, back to the good news we mentioned previously: there is an existing model we could use to limit the opportunity for abuse.  You see, many U.S. voters, in a growing number of States, already have the ability to sit in a café and use their smart phone and a web site to identify themselves sufficiently to see their full voter record, and in some cases even update part of that voter record.

So, the idea is: why not extend that with a little extra record keeping of when a voter reports that they have arrived at the polls, and when they said they were done? In fact, it need not even be an extension of existing online voter services, and could be done in places that are currently without online voter services altogether.  It could even be the first online voter service in those places.

The key here is voters “sufficiently identify themselves” through some existing process, and that identification has to be based an existing voter record.  In complex online voter services (like paperless online voter registration), that involves a 3-way real-time connection between the voter’s digital device, the front-end web server that it talks to, and a privileged and controlled connection from the front-end to obtain specific voter data in the back-end.  But in a service like this, it could be even simpler, with a system that’s based on a copy of the voter record data, indeed, just that part that the voter needs to use to “identify themselves sufficiently”.

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  The fact is, State and/or local elections officials generally manage the voter database.  And our Stakeholders inform us its still likely these jurisdictions would want to operate this service in order to retain control of the data, and to control the ways and means of “sufficient identity” to be consistent with election laws, current usage practices, and other factors.  On the other hand, a polling place traffic monitor service can be a completely standalone system – a better solution we think, and more likely to be tried by everyone.

OK, that’s enough for the reasonably controlled and accurate crowd-source reporting of wait times. What about the benefits from it – the visibility on wait times?  As is almost always the case in transparent, open government computing these days, there are two parallel answers.

The first answer is that the same system that voters report into, could also provide the aggregated information to the public.  For example, using a web app, one could type in their street address (or get some help in selecting it, akin to our Digital Poll Book), and see the wait time info for a given precinct.  They could also view a list of the top-5 shortest current wait times and bottom-5 longest wait times of the precincts in their county, and see where their precinct sits in that ranking.  They could also study graphs of moving averages of wait times – well, you can ideate for yourself.  It’s really a question of what kind of information regular voters would actually value, and that local election officials would want to show.

The second answer is that this system must provide a web services API so that “other systems” can query this wait-time-reporting service.  These other systems should be able to get any slice of the raw data, or the whole thing, up to the minute.  Then they could do whatever visualization, reporting, or other services thought up by the clever people operating this other system.

For me, I’d like an app on my phone that pings like my calendar reminders, that I set to ping myself after 9am (no voting without adequate caffeine!) but before 3pm (high school lets out and street traffic becomes a sh*t show ;-)); but oh, when the waiting time is <10 minutes.  I’d also like something that tells me if/when turn-out in my precinct (or my county, or some geographic slice) tips over 50% of non-absentee voters.  And you can imagine others.  But the main point is that we do not expect our State or local election officials to deliver that to us.  We do hope that they can deliver the basics, including that API so that others can do cool stuff with the data.

Actually, it’s an important division of labor.

Government organizations have the data and need to “get the data out” both in raw form via an API, and in some form useful for individual voters’ practical needs on Election Day.  Then other organizations or individuals can use that API with their different vision and innovation to put that data to a range of additional good uses.  That's our view.

So, in our situation at the TrustTheVote Project, it’s actually really possible.  We already have the pieces: [1] the whole technology framework for online voter services, based on existing legacy databases; [2] the web and mobile computing technology framework with web services and APIs; [3] existing voter services that are worked examples of how to use these frameworks; and [4] some leading election officials who are already committed to using all these pieces, in real life, to help real voters.  This “voting wait-time tracker” system we call PollMon is actually one of the simplest examples of this type of computing.

We’re ready to build one.  And we told the Knight News Challenge so.  We say, let’s do this.  Wanna help?  Let us know.  We've already had some rockin good ideas and some important suggestions.

GAM | out



Long Lines to Vote: Progressive, Conservative, Net-head, Bell-head

I hate to see news outlets casting in a partisan political view the issues of voter registration and ready access to the voting booth. But don't give up on the NYT article Waiting Times at Ballot Boxes Draw Scrutiny despite its partisan lead sentence. I rarely do political commentary, but I'll to a little today, specifically in the context of this article, which is very revealing about a traditional -- and I think healthy -- polarity of the American political tradition. One side of the polarity sees issues like this not a problem per se, but a defect in the implementation of current rules. You might call this a "conservative" side of American political problem solving -- don't change the rules, but do act to improve the way that they're put into practice. In this case, for this view, the issue of long lines at polling places is an issue of capacity that's "very easily handled" as NYT quoted Sen. Grassley. The implied solution is more and smaller precincts, more polling places, more voting stations in the polling places, and faster procedures for voter check-in. (I should add that in the latter case, there are tech solutions, like our DIY voter check-in via the Voter Portal we did in 2012, or the Digital Pollbook project of this year.)


The other side of the polarity, which you might call "progressive", sees issues like this as a problem that needs a solution by changing the current rules, which currently define a system that's not working. Further, the progressive sees such rule changes as an inherent part of a process of evolution of rules (a progression). In this case, for this view, traditional polling place operations are inherently flawed in practice; empirically, we have seen that it leads to hot spots where people wait a long time to check in to vote. The implied solution approach is to create or promote more changes in the voting processes -- early voting, voting centers, more absentee voting, approaches to absentee voting that don't depend on the USPS, separation of Federal elections form those messy local elections with mile-long ballots, … lots of ideas. (And some of them are partly technologically enabled!)


I'm a conservative by temperament: don't fix it unless you're sure it's broken, try some incremental tweaks before replacing it, keep it simple, every change brings in a host of unintended side effects, better the devil you know, and so on. But I like both of these approaches, because they both have a common factor -- increased Federal spending on Federal elections. Believe me the local election officials need it!

Lastly, there's also a tech analogy in the nethead vs. bellhead polarity. Netheads see problems not as structural but in terms of capacity and scale; if your network isn't working right, throw in some more network capacity and compute capacity, but conserve the simplicity of the current structure. Bellheads want to implement  progressively more careful control systems. It's a long story about how we now have both in a sort of wave/particle duality, but for this political issue, the geek approach of "both!", is really easy to say: Throw lots more resources at the long lines problem in the current system (line up to vote in person in one specific place on election day), while at the same time doing more with alternative methods; see what happens, and use the results to drive better application of more resources where that has a positive effect, and also use the results to drive more progress in tuning the new approaches (alternate voting methods) in parallel to the existing system with its preserved simplicity. I rarely expect the political process to be informed by the geek view, but there it is.

So, in regard to this supposed political tussle coming, I say: "I hope you both win!"

-- EJS



Dude, What Is My Ballot, Really?

(Part 2 of 2: What's My Ballot?) Today, I'm continuing on from a recent post, which compared my in-person voting experience with one method of Internet-based voting: return of marked ballots by fax or email. Next up is a similar comparison with another form of Internet-based voting: Internet voting from home using a PC's Web browser.

Let's briefly recall the result at the end of the day in my polling place: 1. Some paper ballots in a ballot box. 2. Some digital vote totals in a computer, and set of paper rolls that provide a ballot-like paper trail of each voter's activity that led to those vote totals. The paper trails can be used to check the correctness of the digital vote totals. Let's also recall the result at the end of the day with email ballot return: 1. Some printed versions of faxed/emailed ballots, which are treated as ballots for counting purposes. While we're at it, let's recall the results of the old lever machines too: 1. Some mechanical vote totals in one or more machines 2. A hand-recorded paper transcription of the "odometer" readings. (Those machines were a lot harder to move than a computer is! So the transcriptions were the basis for vote totals.)

Now, on to home-based Web i-voting. Before doing the end-of-the-day comparison, let's start with what the experience looks like -- fundamentally, it's Web pages. You point your browser to a Web site; you type in your voter identification, a bit like the in-person poll-book signing experience; and then you get your ballot: one or more Web pages. Various Internet voting products and services differ, but they are all fundamentally similar to something that I bet many readers have seen already: online surveys. Take a look at this simple election-like survey about music in Cuyahoga County. The web page looks like a simple ballot, with contests for vocalist and guitarist instead of governor and dog-catcher. There are candidates, and you vote by selecting one with a mouse click on a radio button next to the name of your favorite.

So far, so familiar, but when I press that submit button, what happens? Where's my ballot? Let's take it step by step.

  • The submit button is part of an HTML form, which is part of the Web page. (You can see the HTML form if you "View Page Source" in your browser.)
  • Pressing the button tells your browser to collect up the form's data, which might include Rachel Roberts for Vocalist if you had clicked the radio button next to Rachel.
  • These parts of the forms data are something that in election lingo you might call a "vote" (or "contest selection" to be precise.)
  • The HTML form data, including the vote-oid data, is sent from your browser to the Web server via an HTTP POST operation.
  • The HTTP transaction is typically via an encrypted SSL session, to preserve privacy en route over the Internet.
  • The Web server passes the POST parameters to some election-specific Web application software, which interprets the data as votes, and stores the vote data in a database.

Now, let's be specific about that database stuff. In surveymonkey, there is a database record for each Cleveland Music survey response, and it's possible (if the survey was set up that way) that the record also includes some information about the person who responded. In actual government voting, though, of course we don't want that. So even though the i-voting server has a database of voters, and even though you had to log in to the i-voting server, and even though you were only allowed to vote if the voter record said you were allowed to vote, still your vote data shouldn't be stored with your voter record. So, the vote data is supposed to be anonymously and separately stored, becoming part of vote totals for each candidate in each contest.

Can you say "odometer"? Okay, maybe it's not that obvious, so let me juxtapose a couple images. As I recounted earlier, a much younger me is standing in the voting booth of a lever machine, looking a big bank of little switches next to candidate names, and thinking that is the ballot. Then the big lever is pulled, the little switches flip back, and it's like the ballot just evaporated! Though of course I was told that the counter dials in the back of the machine did tick over like the odometer on a car, recording each vote. The votes were stored on the odometers, but the ballot was gone without a trace. Now shift the scene to my first surveymonkey experience. I clicked some radio buttons, clicked submit, and poof! what I thought was a ballot just disappeared. I'm told that the counters in a database somewhere ticked over to record my "votes." Again, votes were supposedly recorded, but there wasn't really ever a durable ballot. Home-based web client-server Internet voting is just like that, regardless of varying technical implementation details. There's no durable ballot document.

So, at the end of the day, we have stored vote totals in a database of a system that also logged the voter logins. At that point I don't have an answer to "What's the ballot" anymore than I do for lever machines or the early paper-trail-less DREs. Unlike the (much-more-insecure) email ballot delivery, we don't really know what or where the ballots are. Recalling my experience in the Middlefield Road fire house, the vote data is similarly stored as bits on a computer, but!!! there is also the paper trail. That paper trail can be used to audit the system and detect errors and fraud, and serves as the durable record of the vote -- almost a ballot, except for being on flimsy paper with some ballot information left out. But with i-voting, there is nothing even similar. Any kind of auditing that's done, is done using data saved on the server computers, rather than looking at a ballot document that the voter also saw.

Is that so terrible? Maybe so, maybe not. A durable ballot is not a holy requirement for U.S. elections -- though in some parts of the country it almost is. And a durable ballot may not be a requirement for a voting system that is specifically and only for timely assistance of overseas and military voters. Such requirements are a matter of local election law and decisions of local election officials. But my critical observation here is about voter trust. Trust derives in large measure from comprehension. And for many voters, a voting system is comprehensible if the voter knows what the ballot is, where it goes, and what happens to it. That's why overseas voters like fax and email return. Despite the security and anonymity problems, the voter understands that ballot, how it pops out of the fax/printer on the other side of the planet, and how its counted as a paper ballot. The same can't be said for paperless home-based i-voting. As a consequence, I think that it will be harder to build trust, at least in some parts of the country that are paper-centric. However, it may be less of a big deal if limited to overseas and military voters, whose main concern is "get the the ballot home in time to be counted." The pilots are happening, and time will tell.

-- EJS



MOVE Act Implementation: Call For Participation

The TrustTheVote Project issued its first formal "Call For Participation" ("CFP") to its Stakeholder Community last evening, and five elections jurisdiction have already indicated interest. The CFP is inviting collaboration from elections jurisdictions all over the country who need to determine how to comply with the mandates of the new federal MOVE Act -- particularly the requirement to provide a digital (online) means to deliver a download-ready blank ballot for any overseas voter wishing to participate in an election in their jurisdiction, and particularly one that has any federal contest included.

The TrustTheVote Project has developed a sufficient amount of its overall elections systems framework to be able to deliver a solution today for this requirement (pending any adjustments, modifications, or "tweaking" required to meet local requirements.) 

Really, this is a big deal.  You see, digitally serving anyone the official ballot for their district of residence is deceptively simple.  In fact, its non-trivial.  And yet, every jurisdiction where there are permanent residents stationed overseas either in the military or in some other NGO including simply an employer assignment needs to (and by federal law must) be able to cast an absentee ballot.  But how to get the ballot to them in time for them to prepare it and return to be counted?  We first presented a solution for this in a White Paper in December 2009.

To back up a bit, the MOVE Act was signed into law in November by the President, and essentially is intended to update and bring into the 21st century digital society the UOCAVA law from decades ago. For readers unfamiliar with these terms, here's a quick tutorial.

In 1986, Congress passed the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act ("UOCAVA").  The UOCAVA requires that the states and territories allow certain groups of citizens to register and vote absentee in elections for Federal offices. In addition, most states and territories have their own laws allowing citizens covered by the UOCAVA to register and vote absentee in state and local elections as well. United States citizens covered by the UOCAVA include: members of the United States Uniformed Services and merchant marine; their family members; and United States citizens residing outside the United States.

After the 2008 elections cycle it was determined that up to 1 in 4 military and overseas voters were disenfranchised because they didn't receive their ballots in time.  In the autumn of 2009, Congress passed the new Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, which is a complement and update to UOCAVA.  Among other provisions, the MOVE Act mandates that States shall provide a digital (online) means for a UOCAVA voter to manage their voter registration status and to receive a download ready blank ballot for the elections jurisdiction of their registered permanent residence.

Of course, there are those out there who shrill at the prospect that somehow, someway this could lead to Internet voting.  Very unlikely, and please don't get me started down that rat hole either.  Let me stay trained on the important point here.

The work of the TrustTheVote Project, to bring innovative open source digital voting technology to the public, already addresses the mandates of the MOVE Act.  And we've reached a point where issuing the CFP just makes sense to enlarge the pool of jurisidictions testing and evaluating our solution, and positioning themselves to acquire the tools when they are ready.

And of course, the really nice part: the software tools are free -- that's the benevolent point of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation and the TrustTheVote Project.  Yes, we appreciate and encourage donations to the Foundation to defray the development costs (particularly if a jurisdiction desires the assistance of our technology development team to tailor the software to their exacting requirements), but the source code is free and will be theirs to do with as they wish (especially for software that does not require certification for voting systems purposes.)

Interested?  Great!  Get started by downloading the CFP here.  And get in touch with us.

Cheers GAM|out



Barbara Simons on Voter Registration

We have a special treat today with a guest blog from Barbara Simons, an eminent computer scientist who is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. (More on Barbara: her bio.) She has an excellent account of part of the story about where voter registration came from, and why it is controversial that U.S. citizens must proactively request permission to vote, and then pass muster w.r.t. eligibility requirements as evaluated by an election official.  The controversy, in a nutshell, is that registration can be a way of preventing people from voting, including via the practice of disenfranchising felons.  So where did the practice of registration, and the controversy, come from? Barbara: take it away ... [Ed. Note:  The following commentary from Barbara Simons incorporates for referential, historical, and explanatory purposes only quotations that by any standard today would be considered controversial, inappropriate, and simply reprehensible.  They are only quotes pulled from history to explain the point and are not the opinions or positions of Ms. Simons, the TrustTheVote Project, or the OSDV Foundation.]

Felon disenfranchisement was introduced in the South after the Civil War as a way of disenfranchising the newly freed slaves. Southern whites even invented new felonies that were applied almost exclusively to African Americans. Here are some quotes from that era.

From a Mississippi Supreme Court decision upholding the state's disenfranchisement law (Ratliff v. Beale): "The [constitutional] convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race.  By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament and of character, which clearly distinguished it, as a race, from that of the whites -- a patient docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without aforethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites.  Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone."

The following is from John Field Bunting, who introduced disenfranchisement legislation in Alabama in 1901: "The crime of wife-beating alone would disqualify sixty percent of the Negroes." Perhaps the bluntest acknowledgment of the purpose of the felon disenfranchisement laws was provided by Carter Glass, a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1902.  Glass stated that Virginia's felony disenfranchisement scheme

... will eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this State in less than 5 years, so that in no single county will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government.

The end of Reconstruction marked the beginning of disenfranchisement for the newly freed slaves.  In the South during the Jim Crow era that followed, African Americans were prevented from registering by a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests, felon disenfranchisement, and threatened or real violence.  For example, there were 130,334 African American voters in Louisiana in 1896, but only 1,342 in 1904.

According to "Registration of Voters in Louisiana": "Six pages of [the Constitution of 1898] are devoted to suffrage and elections.  The object of the convention was, of course, to establish white supremacy by reducing the number of Negroes voting to a minimum.  The qualifications to vote as well as

the entire system of registration were written in such a way that most Negroes could be disenfranchised.

Other clauses were incorporated to permit the poor white to vote and yet not admit the Negro to the ballot."

Felon disenfranchisement laws still have a disproportionate impact on African Americans.  Only Maine and Vermont (both of which have small African American populations) have no felon disenfranchisement laws.  Felons can vote from prison in those states.  Southern states are disproportionately represented among states with the extensive felon disenfranchisement laws, as are states with large non-white prison populations.  African American males have been significantly impacted, with roughly one in six disenfranchised in the early 21 century because of felony convictions.

It seems likely that if the U.S. didn't engage in felon disenfranchisement that a number of election results, including at the presidential level, would have had different outcomes. The U.S. is the only democracy that has lifetime felon disenfranchisement.  We are still living with the legacy of slavery.

-- Barbara Simons

PS: Thanks again to Barbara for a valuable history lesson of background for our work at TTV to  include registration as a legally required part of a broader effort voter record management technology, that also includes some of the changes contemplated by the "election modernization" efforts in Congress.  -- John Sebes, CTO TrustTheVote Project



Two Ballots, New Ballots

Following a previous post with before-and-after pictures of an ideal "re-modeling"of  a ballot, I have a couple notes about how such remodeling is harder in practice; another ballot image to illustrate; and some good news about on-going TTV work on ballot image processing. That ideal remodeling showed how to both fix one of class of usability flaws (visually "losing" some of the candidates in a race), and typical approach to increase accessibility, abandoning the eye-crossingly stark and skeletal black-and-white layout for one with colors, shading, fonts, and space to help visually separate distinct elements and visual highlight important elements. But the the "after" picture is idealistic in two ways.

[1] The full range of accessibility issues is much larger. To get an idea of the how much larger -- for example, variations on one color or two, one language or two, paper size, placement of instruction text -- check out part of the results of the AIGA work on ballot design. Or, take a look at the below sample image, which shows some of the fruit of two years of expert input and testing -- which we at TTV are very fortunate to be able to leverage!

[2] The intended use of these images is to be printed as paper ballots that are marked by voters (manually or with digital assistance) and can be counted by an optical scanner. The previous "after" picture lacked the big visual mess of a bunch of black rectangles that leapt to the eye much more than the actual ballot information - needed for an optical scanner to orient the ballot image and find the marks. The AIGA sample below has these "timing marks" added back in, with a bit less visual clutter, but still a lot of them.

The good news I mentioned is about the timing marks and their usability impact. Results so far indicate that our scanner can get by just fine with only marks in each of the 4 corners -- thus dispensing with most of the usability impact of the timing marks. This may seem ultra geeky, but it is the sort techie result that keeps us going. ;-) More details on this result in a later post.

-- EJS

AIGA Optical-Scan Sample Ballot



Levers, HAVA, and "Compliance"

Kudos to Brad Friedman for making a good call on a subtle point in his comment on my posting about Bo Lipari's coverage of the NY State testing of voting systems. Brad objects to my statement that lever machines are not compliant with the Help Amercia Vote Act (HAVA). And rightly so! The bad news about the adjective "HAVA compliant" is that people can and do disagree about the interpretation of that Act of Congress. The good news is that the noun "HAVA compliance" is well defined by facts on the ground, if not in the Act itself.

Those facts on the ground are composed of each state's implementation of its HAVA compliance plan, under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice. The DoJ has for years been working with states, including the lever-machine states of NY and CT, on each state's HAVA compliance plan. Those plans in NY include the use of machine-counted paper ballots, some hand-marked, and some from ballot marking devices that provide enhanced access for voters who are unable or unwilling to mark paper ballots by hand. Those plans do not include the continued of lever machines.

So we can say that lever machines are not part of HAVA-compliance (noun) in NY or CT.

Further, I got the impression, from talking to folks involved in HAVA compliance program implementations, that there was no chance of a compliance program being approved if it was based on the continued use of lever machines. If true, that might well based on what Brad would consider a misinterpretation of HAVA.

Would it be possible for a state to have an acceptable HAVA compliance plan that included lever machines? Perhaps a plan that included electronic DREs for enhanced access, lever machines (which are mechanical direct-record election devices), and tools for combining the results from both into an auditable election result? Possibly, but likely we'll never know, as the last few HAVA-compliance program engines pull into the station at the end of ride.

-- EJS



Tales From Real Life: Testing

Another in our series of real life stories ... how it actually works for real election officials to test a new voting system that they might be adopting for use in the state. The backplot is that New York State has been unwilling to give up its admittedly no-longer-legal*  lever machines, until the the state Board of Elections is confident that they have a replacement that not only meets Federal standards, but also is reliable and meeting similar requirements met by the old lever machines. There have been several setbacks in the adoption process, but the latest phase is some detailed testing of the candidate systems. (For the real voting tech geeks, what's being tested is a hybrid of the Dominion ImageCast scanner/Ballot Marking Device and the ES&S DS200 scanner with the Automark BMD.)

Bo Lipari is is on the Advisory Committee for this process, and has reported in detail on the testing process. You don't have to be a complete election geek to scan Bo's tales, and be impressed with the level and breadth of of diligence, and the kinds of kinks and hiccups that can occur. And of course the reportage is very helpful to us, as a concrete example of what kind of real life testing is needed for any new voting system, open or closed, to be accepted for use in U.S. elections.

-- EJS

* No-longer-legal means that NY state law was changed to require replacement of lever machines. In the initial release of this note I erroneously said that the replacement requirement was driven by HAVA. Thanks again to alert readers (see comments below) for the catch, and for providing many resources on the vexed question of "HAVA compliant" generally and lever machines specifically.



Tales from Real Life: Accessibility

Possible futures of election technology ... something you read about here a good deal. For some contrast, I want to offer some pointers to real people telling real stories about how real voting systems work today. And I don't mean the horror stories about voting machine breakdowns and security problems. These stories are from people right in the trenches of trying to make voting systems work today. I'll start with real life concerns about accessibility. Noel Runyan reports on his experiences in using voting machines with features for enhanced access for people with disabilities. Enhanced access is a critical of post-HAVA voting systems, but even leaving aside legal requirements, perhaps one in five voters has a disability of some kind relevant to voting, or really any reason to benefit from enhanced access. That includes me, if I forget to bring my reading glasses to the polling place! There is a lot to learn from Noel's comments -- no surprise, since he also led the accessibility portion of the California Top to Bottom Review -- and it certainly helps us at TTV retain the appropriate humility towards this one rather large part of the election technology that needs re-inventing. I can't resist quoting one excerpt:

Why should voters with disabilities continue to be forced to vote on segregated ballot systems that are far too complicated for the pollworkers to operate and that make us vulnerable to disenfranchisement because of poor machine reliability and inadequate training and/or poor attitudes on the part of the pollworkers?

Noel's specific comments give specific details, showing the room for improvement, and just as important to me, showing how difficult it can be to excel at voting system accessibility.

-- EJS



Five Ways to Call a Voting Machine a ...

Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we're building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion -- so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don't work elsewhere.