Electronic Voting Systems

Electronic Voting Systems

Book - The Project Outcome

Our book, Voting Technology: The Not-So-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot which describes in detail all the outcome of our three year study about the usabilty of voting systems is now available.

Presentation at USACM EC Meeting slides [PDF] - Feb 24, 2008

Project Description

Voting technologies have received higher visibility since the 2000 Florida elections. And electronic systems have received a lot of attention - but these systems raise a new host of concerns. I have focused on the usability aspects.

Report [PDF]: A Study of Vote Verification Technology Conducted for the Maryland State Board of Elections - January 2006
First results from an NSF-funded project to assess voting technology and ballot design started in July 2003:
- PowerPoint slides (10 Meg), Jan 2005 at NASED (National Association of State Election Directors)
Nov 2002: Exit poll to see how the Diebold system worked in practice.
Also see PowerPoint slides - 9 Meg - presented at a CHI 2003 panel.
Spring 2002: We then evaluated the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting systems that several counties in the state of Maryland are starting to use (with UMD professor Paul Herrnson)
- Final report
- Washington Post Op-ed
- CHI 2003 Paper (slides - 19 Meg)
- The Maryland State Board of Elections wrote a rebuttal to our report.
  Rebuttal with our comments
Jan 2002: Vision for the need of involving HCI and Information Visualization professionals in the design of electronic voting systems at the CalTech/MIT West Conference in Washington, DC in January, 2002. (PowerPoint slides and PDF)

I am also exploring alternative interfaces for electronic voting systems. By using Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) for an electronic voting interface, voters can easily get an overview of their ballot as well as directly access each specific race. The following images show a sequence of screen snapshots as the voter zooms from an overview of the whole election into a single amendment race. Click on each image to see a full-resolution image.

The complete source code and runnable demo is available. To use this demo, you need Java installed. Then, download and unzip the files and on Windows, double-click "run". The application will run. When it asks for a code to vote, enter "123".