Just Like Paper - a baseline for classifying e-voting usability

International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, 2015

Voting has been an accepted means for electing candidates, receiving public approval for referendums and budgets, and for many other tasks where the will of the people, whether a broad population or a select group, can be recorded and measured in a tangible way. Because of advances in technology, together with problems inherent in manual forms of voting, the concepts and issues relating to electronic voting (e-voting) and various other technology-based forms, are been proposed, discussed, and examined. The goal of all such systems is the casting and recording of the votes from eligible voters as they intended to be cast, with adequate security. This security requires that there be no identifiable connection between the voter and the vote that is cast, while providing an audit trail that can be used to validate that every vote was counted and tallied, as cast. The focus of this paper is to examine electronic voting technologies from the perspective of usability in controlled environm...

2006

Expert reviews, laboratory tests, and a large-scale field study of one paper/optical scan and five electronic voting systems suggested numerous possible improvements. Changes could be made in all aspects of the process-signing-on, navigating across the ballot, checking and changing votes, casting write-in votes, and reviewing and casting the ballot. A paper trail was largely ignored by voters. Voters generally cast votes as intended, but complexities, such as changing votes and using a ballot with a straight-party feature, reduced voting accuracy. We call for additional usability research to examine new and altered systems, especially considering add-ons such as voter verifiable paper trails.

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

Voting systems must be usable by all eligible voters regardless of their skills, abilities, and experiences. However, current voting systems do not provide accessibility to all voters, including those with physical and cognitive limitations. To make voting easier for people with and without disabilities, we developed a universal voting interface that integrates a simplified and flexible ballot design that includes multimodal I/O interfaces. The formative usability study results demonstrate people with various types of disabilities could perform the voting tasks on EZ Ballot using their preferred input. In order to refine the EZ Ballot interface, the study found the specific issues on design such as instruction, selection of candidates, confusion about going back, incorrect gestural interaction, and write-in interface.

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2009

The arrival of electronic voting has generated considerable controversy, mostly about its vulnerability to fraud. By comparison, virtually no attention has been given to its usability, i.e., voters' ability to vote as they intend, which was central to the controversy surrounding the 2000 US presidential election. Yet it is hard to imagine a domain of human-computer interaction where usability has more impact on how democracy works. This article reports a laboratory investigation of the usability of six electronic voting systems chosen to represent the features of systems in current use and potentially in future use. The primary question was whether e-voting systems are sufficiently hard to use that voting accuracy and satisfaction are compromised. We observed that voters often seemed quite lost taking far more than the required number of actions to cast individual votes, especially when they ultimately voted inaccurately. Their satisfaction went down as their effort went up. And accuracy with some systems was disturbingly low. While many of these problems are easy to fix, manufacturers will need to adopt usability engineering practices that have vastly improved user interfaces throughout the software industry.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2013

This work presents a classification system for commercial electronic voting machines. We term this classification system the 'Just-Like-Paper' or JLP classification. We are particularly interested in incremental differences in functionality between voting systems and how that functionality differs from 'traditional' pen and paper based voting. We successfully applied the JLP classification to the ongoing development of our novel DualVote eVoting system where its application led to the development of a passive feedback protocol.

2010

The authors present a novel e-Voting system called "Dual Vote", which couples the strength of electronic voting with the traditional pen and paper user interface (UI). Through the use of pen and paper as a voting medium the system addresses usability problems and provides a verifi able audit trail; two i ssues which have a fflicted modern e-voting solut ions. The paper presen ts the implem entation details of the Dual Vote s ystem, whic h is mainly comprised of an inductiv e sensor array and a cap acitive-based electron ic pen. A n evaluation is also condu cted which demonstr ates the h igh level of usability as well as assessing the technical competency of the Dual Vote system.

2011

Two issues that have significantly impeded the widespread adoption and acceptance of modern e-voting solutions are the lack of an intuitive user interface and the inability to formally verify the results. This paper presents the findings of an extensive analysis of public opinion on usability and verifiability in e-voting. Based on these results it describes a novel e-voting system called DualVote, which couples the strength of electronic voting with the traditional pen and paper user interface (UI). An evaluation of the proposed system is also presented, which demonstrates a high level of usability by comparison to other E-Voting solutions.

Universal Access in the Information Society, 2011

+47 22 85 25 00 +47 22 69 76 60 [email protected] [email protected] www.nr.no Parts of this work were presented at the Unitech2010 conference, see Halbach et al [1].

2004

Thank you for the opportunity to address members of the EAC/TGDC, thank you to NIST for hosting these hearings and to Whitney Quesenbery for organizing today’s panels. I am an Associate Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research where I teach courses in survey methodology. My background is in cognitive psychology and current research interests include usability of web surveys and, more recently, usability of electronic voting systems. I am here on behalf of an interdisciplinary research team (four political scientists, one computer scientist and one psychologist) working on a project funded by the National

Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '08, 2008

In the 2006 U.S. election, it was estimated that over 66 million people would be voting on direct recording electronic (DRE) systems in 34% of the nation's counties . Although these computer-based voting systems have been widely adopted, they have not been empirically proven to be more usable than their predecessors. The series of studies reported here compares usability data from a DRE with those from more traditional voting technologies (paper ballots, punch cards, and lever machines). Results indicate that there were little differences between the DRE and these older methods in efficiency or effectiveness. However, in terms of user satisfaction, the DRE was significantly better than the older methods. Paper ballots also perform well, but participants were much more satisfied with their experiences voting on the DRE. The disconnect between subjective and objective usability has potential policy ramifications.