There are a number of confusing things that happen at the end of the
voting process on an iVotronic. And casting a ballot always takes two
steps on these machines.
1. There are *two* places where a voter can answer the call to action:
a physical button at the top of the screen that lights up red when the
voter reaches the summary/review screen, and a green button in the
touchscreen UI that usually says something like "Cast your ballot."
THEN
2. There's a confirmation screen. But the messaging there isn't always
obvious. Here, the voter touches Cast Ballot again.
What the Kentucky election officials did was tell voters they were
done when they had taken the first step. Then they went back to the
voting booth and hit a Back button to go through the ballot again,
changing votes. Then they cast the ballots themselves.
This article has a pretty good explanation of what happened:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7001
Dana
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
Dana Chisnell
desk: 415.392.0776
mobile: 415.519.1148
dana AT usabilityworks DOT net
www.usabilityworks.net
http://usabilitytestinghowto.blogspot.com/
On Mar 25, 2009, at 6:35 AM, j.eric townsend wrote:
The entire article is worth reading (and has actual hot links), but
I'll
call out how the design failure(?) was exploited by pollworkers to
change votes:
<http://www.crypto.com/blog/vote_fraud_in_kentucky/>
[...]
The Kentucky officials are accused of taking advantage of a somewhat
confusing aspect of the way the iVotronic interface was implemented.
In particular, the behavior (as described in the indictment)
of the version of the iVotronic used in Clay County
apparently differs a bit from the behavior described in ES&S's
standard
<a href="http://www.essvote.com/HTML/docs/iVotronic.pdf";>instruction
sheet
for voters [pdf - see page 2]</a>.
A <a href="http://www.essvote.com/HTML/iVotronicDemo1/
demo.html">flash-based
iVotronic demo available from ES&S here</a> shows the same
procedure, with the VOTE button as the last step. But evidently
there's another version of the iVotronic
interface in which
pressing the VOTE button is only the <em>second to last</em> step. In
those machines, pressing VOTE invokes an extra "confirmation" screen.
The vote is only actually finalized after a "confirm vote" box is
touched
on that screen. (A different flash demo that shows this behavior
with the
version of the iVotronic equipped with a printer is available from
ES&S
<a href="http://www.essvote.com/HTML/iVotronicDemo2/
index.html">here</a>).
So the iVotronic VOTE button doesn't necessarily work the way a
voter who read the standard instructions might expect it to.
<p>
The indictment describes a conspiracy to exploit this ambiguity in
the iVotronic user interface by having pollworkers systematically
(and incorrectly) tell voters that pressing
the VOTE button is the last step. When a misled voter would leave the
machine with the extra "confirm vote" screen still displayed, a
pollworker
would quietly "correct" the not-yet-finalized ballot before casting
it.
It's a pretty elegant attack, exploiting
little more than a poorly designed, ambiguous user interface, printed
instructions that conflict with actual machine behavior, and public
unfamiliarity with equipment that most citizens use at most once or
twice
each year. And once done,
it leaves behind little forensic evidence to expose the deed.
[...]
--
J. Eric "jet" Townsend, CMU Master of Tangible Interaction Design '09
design: www.allartburns.org; hacking: www.flatline.net; HF: KG6ZVQ
PGP: 0xD0D8C2E8 AC9B 0A23 C61A 1B4A 27C5 F799 A681 3C11 D0D8 C2E8
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