Slashdot Mirror
E-Voting Problems Are Mostly User Error, Says ITAA
grcumb writes "InfoWorld is carrying a story today which mentions a press kit being distributed by the Information Technology Association of America. Its purpose? To 'help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context.' Most e-voting problems, they insist, are [l]user issues, where people who don't know how to deal with the new technology cause delays as they seek assistance. They don't seem to feel the need for journalists to understand basic system design issues (like making sure your computer and human processes work), why testing didn't identify these problems, nor why this is better than paper ballots."
These people need to learn some lessons in human relations. I am sure they have some valid points to be made, however, the way they went about it was condescending and insulting to the journalists. I mean, really, I cannot imagine telling journalists that I am going to "help journalists put election equipment-related snafus in context." Journalists feel that it is their job to collect info and put things into context themselves. The ITAA shot themselves in the foot.
http://www.busyweather.com/
The problems with e-voting are user error? That's funny I thought it had something to do with miscounted votes, buggy or crashed systems and clearly biased voting machine companies.
Hell! If it was user error this whole time then the solution is obvious -- we need a phone in every voting booth with a direct line to some Level 1 tech support guy! Can you picture this?:
Support Guy: "Thank you for calling Voting Machines, Inc. my name is Tony, how may I assist you today?"Voter: "I'm having a problem voting -- smoke seems to be coming out of the back of the machine and there is a bad grinding noise."
Support Guy: "Yes sir. Before I can help you I need your express service code."
Voter: "I don't know where that is! This machine is not letting me vote."
Support Guy: "Sir, I can't help you without your express service code."
Voter: "Grrr. It's XXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-X"
Support Guy: "Thank you sir. Now is your voting machine plugged in and turned on?"
Voter: "Yes! Why is smoke coming out? It won't let me vote."
Support Guy: "Is your ballot on the screen or do you see the desktop?"
Voter: "I don't know! Grrr... what about the smoke??"
Support Guy: "Sir, I have a procedure that I need to follow and that procedure requires me to know if your ballot is on the screen or not."
Poll Worker: "Sir, state law only allows you three minutes to vote. You need to hurry up and finish."
Voter: "Damnit! I am almost out of time. How can I vote?"
Support Guy: "Sir, your voting machine is clearly infected with spyware and we don't support that. I highly recommend that you call Microsoft for further assistance. Thank you for calling Voting Machines, Inc. and have a nice day."
Voter: "How do you know it's spyware? We haven't even gotten anywhere yet!"
[Click. Dialtone. Sounds of fire sirens in the distance]
Voter: "Hello? Hello?"
Poll Worker: "Sir, your time is up."
And just think of the fun if they outsourced the support center overseas....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
this is the ITAA? Aren't they supposed to advocate GOOD software design? Guess what, if the user is making errors, then it's the problem of the software maker. Obviously they didn't design their interface right, obviously they didn't write their instructions well enough etc. The user isn't supposed to have to study a user's manual before voting.
Come on, this "blame the user" bs is getting really old. Appearently corporations are allowed to be totally incompetent with their own products, but it's always the users fault if they don't know how to use them......
Monstar L
India, the worlds largest democracy recently had an all electronic voting. Thats a few hundred million voters. Isn't he USA one of the most educated countries in the world ? The highest distribution of luxury goods ? 99% of the voters has cable TV, whereas in india many voters see a monitor once every 5 years : when they vote.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
# Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks. # Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first. # This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
Just what we need, another double A organization.
RIAA
MPAA
ITAA (It's new!!! : ^D)
I suggest we all comence drinking heavily and then meet up at AA.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
A fundamental design feature of any voting system must be that the expected "user error" rate must be well, well below the expected vote differential otherwise the system fails in its primary task of capturing the wishes of the voters.
User error can be engineered away. Not by "genius" engineers sitting in some back room coming up with better UIs, but "average" engineers with clipboards field testing the system, watching where users make mistakes, and adjusting the system to compensate.
While it's fun to bash Diebold and everything, I can see how most of the issues are user problems. I worked as a cashier in a grocery store for years and if I had a nickel for everytime someone got confused on how to use the credit/debit card machine at the register, I'd be a millionaire. People didn't know which way to swipe the freaking card, they hit 'cancel' instead of 'OK', etc. They screwed up in ways I didn't even think were possible. So it comes as no suprise that user error is largely to blame for e-voting mishaps.
User error? But the voters are the users - if the voter cannot use the system, then the system should not be used! It's not enough to just sit smugly and say "well, it was a user error", if you've already anticipated that as a problem.
If the users - the voters - will not be able to use the system, then ditch the system for something they can use. Surely that was the whole point behind ditching the punch card system? What's the point in ditching one system for another that the voters still can't use?!
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
Perhaps the United States should drop those machines, use paper ballots and outsource the actual counting to India. With more than one billion citizens, India is the biggest Democracy on the planet, and they always get their ballots counted in time for their electors to mount their horses and take a two-week-trip to Washington.
When I went to vote in 2000 it was a multi-fold 8.5"x11" (I think) ballot with the names in large type, use a marker to connect an arrow by the candidates name. None of this punch card chadding, miss aliging of marks, or any of the many faults in the butterfly ballot. The only way you could screw that up was to drool until the ink smeared.
Oh my god, did I just figure out the next big problem, drooling idiots shorting out the touch screens.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
The better web designers do user testing. Industrial designers do user testing. Marketing gurus do user testing. You'd think an issue as important as, oh I don't know...choosing the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world would involve user testing. Sad...very sad.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I think with any new technology there is a certain level of justifiable distrust, but sooner or later we all need to move on.
We all need to move on to a system where no paper trail is kept? Oh for Christ's sake you're a fool and a root cause for your nation's democratic demise! What is so hard with putting a mark in a circle on a piece of paper and have it either counted by hand or fed into a scanner?
I have yet to see any benefit from the electronic voting process besides profit for the people who sell them and a chance for the news to wrap up it's election coverage by 11pm (and look what ended up last time they tried that).
People like you need some real perspective. The voting period in India was a month long. In Afghanistan they didn't even start counting the ballots until days after it was over, and in Canada people still vote with a paper and pencil, and it is no more complicated than putting an X in the correct circle. Whether it is hand counted or run through a machine at least there's something available to audit if a recount is necessary, and rarely do pencils or paper break down and when they do it takes a hell of a lot less time and money to get them working again.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
...we do our voting by putting one piece of paper (a list, actually, as we do not vote for individuals) (we have a king, yes) in an envelope the people at the polling station give you. Then you put the envelope in a box. Then you leave.
By the way, the people at the polling stations are chosen from the different political parties.
Then the boxes are sealed and sent to a counting station (sometimes the same place as the polling station, sometimes somewhere else). There, the votes are put in stacks and counted.
And you know what? It seems to *gasp* work! Revolutionary system, huh?
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
This is a known limitation. The high-level process of recording votes is very simple: present a list of options, record the ones selected. Under the cover a lot of other things need to happen (security, communication, etc) but the part exposed to the workers should be painfully simple, and as close to idiot-proof as possible.
I'm talking about the connections all being large, brightly color-coded and distinctly shaped. Better yet, bundle all the wires required into a single cable, and have a single yellow plug which goes in the back, and securely locks in.
When designing a UI, take the dumbest user you can imagine, then imagine them drunk. If this user can't make the machine work, it's not ready for the general public.
Take a look here:
http://www.itaa.org/about/members.cfm
Diebold is one of their member companies. This group is just shilling for the e-voting machine manufacturers.
The ITAA is a lobbying arm of the big hardware/software corporations. They're the ones that keep issuing studies saying that there's a 'shortage' of American IT workers so the U.S. needs to bring in more H-1B's and outsource more. I'd say they have about as much credibility as certain other more well known *AA's.
[Insert pithy quote here]
People should be marching on their state capitols demanding that the current e-voting machines be replaced with verifiable voting methods such as paper ballots until such time as everyone can be satisfied that the e-voting machines are fair and reliable. (Which probably means when they produce a clear paper trail.)
The foundation of our system of government is put at risk by sloppy or malicious coding and we all sit at home and go about our lives as if nothing is truely at risk. The degree of apathy that has been shown on this issue is astonishing.
Avi Rubin, the leading authority on e-voting, gave a great interview in the recent Dr. Dobbs Journel. I think what he says is something that every voter should hear. (His writings on e-voting are here.) The problem is not whether or not a certain political party or company has rigged these machines to fix the election, it's that the very design and nature of these machines makes it possible to do so in a way that is undetectable.
Up until now, if you wanted to steal an election, you had to coordinate the work of a large number of people in across a large number of states unless you could blame it all on a bunch of people voting incorrectly in one county in Florida. Now, you could subtley alter the programming of these machines and shift a small percentage of the results produced by each one. It would be almost impossible to detect.
It's not just the presidential race that is affected, its all the races. Think of the money that is controlled by these politicians and the incentives available to people who want to make sure they get the "right" political climate in the future. If this type of cheating doesn't happen this election, it will happen in another, and soon.
The only way to make sure that these machines can be trusted is to:
They say we get the government we deserve. If we don't raise hell with out state governments and election boards over the use of these machines, you can be certain of it.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
As somebody who ran a polling station once, hand-counting is pretty damned easy. A couple thousand voters go to each polling centre, There's a half-dozen or so polling booths, that's only a few hundred votes to count.
You count them in front of a peer and volunteer party representatives. Then to be pedantic, your peer counts them again.
The count starts, of course, once the polls close.
If you think of the level of real patriotism left in the U.S., is it really that hard to find a school or public facility to vote in? Is it really that hard to find people to sit at the polls? Is it really that hard to find people to watch over and audit this process?
These electronic voting companies make it sound like voting is drudgery which nobody will volunteer to help with... there is no end of volunteers!
BTW, I've been told that there's at least one state, I don't recall which one, (Winconsin? Wyoming?, some "W" state I've never been to) which uses a similar system to that of Canada.
...do Journalists deserve respect? And since when do Journalists get tech subjects correct with out their hands being held?
"Journalism" these days (and perhaps always?) is a whole lot of sensationalism. Most news comes from a limited group of sources anyway, so its not like Journalists are doing all that much collecting of information. It's a phenomenon that's hard to see when you pick up your local paper (unless you pick up 10 papers a day, you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder), but the same principle is painfully obvious in the "blogosphere". Someone has a story, then the next day, everyone has the story (copied form the first blog).
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
In the UK, we have hand-counted paper ballots. We have had them since we started having elections. It is a system that everybody can understand, and it's evolved over the years to be surprisingly robust.
Each ballot slip is placed whole into the box. So it's verifiable if necessary, by re-counting. The fact of your voting is recorded, but in such a way as not to be able to link your name to a particular ballot paper. In case the ballot slips are secretly marked or anything like that, you can pick your own if you feel sufficiently paranoid {you aren't forced to accept the one the presiding officer gives you}; so it's secret.
Each polling station takes votes from an area no bigger than the volunteers working there could comfortably count by hand all the votes from. So it's scalable -- if you have more voters, you just add more polling stations. It's also quick -- in each polling station, there are only a few thousand votes to count. All this is going on in parallel, results are initially telephoned through and then the ballot papers are sealed back up in case they need to be re-counted.
The numbers involved mean that to "buy" an election, you would have to pay off a lot of people. So it's actually quite tamper-proof. And if any shenanigans are suspected, a recount can be ordered -- or, in the worst case the ballot repeated -- in just the known affected polling stations.
It is not clear to me how this system could be improved on without introducing new failure modes. Any kind of vote-counting machine is susceptible to tampering. Even if it is absolutely open to public scrutiny for the days when it is not being used for an election, there are stunts that could be pulled on the day. And even if the machine is verified by a hand-count, it will still takes the same number of people to hand-count the ballots after the machine is done, so what have you saved?
If you're going to rely on human honesty, it's best to distribute that reliance as widely as possible, i.e. to trust several thousand people to be just a little bit honest rather than trust a few people or just one person to be very honest indeed. After all, the majority of human beings are generally honest, and more so when the stakes are low. What benefit is there to dishonesty in counting a few thousand votes among tens of millions? On the other hand, if you are the managing director of the company that makes the only officially-approved voting machines, you effectively have every election in your hands -- and that is where the benefits of being dishonest do start to show.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
----->>>>
Election Technology Council - ETC
The ETC is a coalition of companies dedicated to the development, delivery and support of electronic voting solutions to the American electorate.
Visit http://www.electiontech.org for more information.
----->>>>
On the about ETC page:
Council Members
Advanced Voting Solutions (AVS)
Diebold Election Systems
Election Systems & Software (ES&S)
Hart InterCivic
Perfect Voting System
Sequioa Voting Systems
Unilect
VoteHere, Inc
----->>>>
'nuff said
Sounds like your run-of-the-mill OSS tech support, if you ask me. Why is it OK to blame "idiot users" when they have problems with complicated OSS, but unacceptable to blame them for not knowing how to use a TOUCH SCREEN?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I can see how most of the issues are user problems [... on credit/debit card machines at grocery stores, customers...] hit 'cancel' instead of 'OK', etc
That's because most debit card machines at grocery stores are deliberately designed to confuse the user into using their card in a way that costs the grocery store less. I started noticing this recently... in the past couple of years... and it started happening first in new machines but gradually older systems have been reprogrammed with the same scheme.
The motivation is obvious: If you use your "credit/debit" card as a credit card, the grocery store pays a credit card fee, you pay the amount on the ticket. If you use your "credit/debit" card as a debit card, the grocery store pays less (if anything), but you pay a transaction fee that can be over $3.00 in some cases.
So, to use it as a credit card: about half have a "credit" or "debit" button you can hit before swiping, so you select "credit" if it's there. Either way, you swipe, then it asks you for a PIN. If you enter the PIN it switches to debit mode, so you have to hit "cancel" at this point. Then it asks you to select "credit" or "debit". Sometimes it asks you to hit "credit/debit" then "credit", if there are other choices (like check-cashing cards). Then, it asks you if the amount is OK. This time you hit "OK" and it goes on to complete the transaction.
I'm not exaggerating, here. Almost every machine does this, and at least half make you go through all these steps.
So, I would NOT classify the problems you're seeing as user error. They're the result of customers being systematically trained to hit "CANCEL" as a necessary part of the transaction. This is a user interface design problem.
And that's just the deliberate design problem... sometimes there are actual bugs in the user interface as well.
For example, the machines at Home Depot in Houston are not all that agressive about the credit/debit card thing, but they will sometimes briefly switch to a screen asking you to swipe your card or hit cancel before bringing up the signature box: this appears to be a programming error, but it looks like there's a problem with the transaction and the first time it happened I hit "CANCEL" at that point, just in case... because I'd gotten charged twice at a pharmacy when it did something similar.
I'm a computer professional: I've been programming computers regularly for over 30 years, using everything from paper tape and punch cards to experimental OpenGL-based 3d user interfaces. I'm not a naive user who isn't used to a variety of user interfaces. Yet I have occasionally hit "CANCEL" at the wrong time. I'm not at all surprised that some people are regularly baffled by grocery store card readers. And these are MUCH simpler than voting machines.
I don't know who this ITAA is, but if they're telling people that voting machine problems are "user error" I wouldn't trust their judgement further than I could spit a Diebold executive.
Well, no one (or very few) will read this now, I know that. But I must say that if this machines are hard to use, assemble and whatever this is tha fault of whoever design them.
Brasil have eletronic voting in a national scale for some years now. Here we have mandatory voting, this means that every Brasilian must vote or at least justify (if you're away for instance). This includes a large portion of the population that is iliterate.
This means that in a federal election, like the last one that elected Lula in 2002, we have eletronic voting machines installed in places in the middle of the amazon jungle, that can only be reached by "donkeys", and those machines are sometimes installed and operated by people who are not intimate with any tecnology at all, and the voters sometimes can't even read.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
...you're part of the precipitate.
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
Elections are run at the county level. The ONLY roll that the state government has is in certifying the results or picking the winner if no results come from the counties.
The infamous "butterfly ballot" was designed by a Democrat. All the counties that Gore requested recounts in were run by Democrats.
The "felon roll" was a list created by the state but it was up to the individual counties to decide what to do with the list. Many counties (including Broward and Dade IIRC) simply ignored the list. Others utilized various procedures to vet the names provided to them before purging their roles. It is estimated that there were still many thousands of illegal votes placed by felons in the 2000 election in Florida.
But hey, continue living in your "Bush stole the elction" cocoon. The facts are far too challenging.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
My mother worked in the last Canadian election as Returning officer. She basically ran a district in an election. She was in charge of making sure everyone was trained, renting the offices, highering the accountant, getting signs printed, etc etc etc.
I was in her office a couple of times and you would be suprised on the signs they have posted everywhere. It's like "Elections for dummies" in there. Everywhere you see a sign that tells you how to do your job. "If this happens, do a b and c. If this happens do x y and z".
I will not be suprised if these electronic voting systems come with big ass signs that say. "If machine is not on, make sure it is plugged in the wall. If machine is not on, and it's plugged in the wall. Please check that the socket has power."
The main thing that I noticed is that most people's job at an election office has been so simplified and so documented as to what to do that almost any person can do that job, regardless of personal intellect. If you can read and write, then you're qualified.
While I do admit that this doesn't help the geeks reputation of trying to be all high and mighty. They won't be the first people to assume that the people running an election are morons.
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
I sent this to Bartlett Cleland, the VP of Public Policy at ITAA. I suggest others do the same. His e-mail address is bcleland@itaa.org.
- - - - -
Mr. Cleland,
Please excuse me if you are not the ITAA staffer responsible for the e-Voting segment, and please forward this to the appropriate person.
Also, let me state at the outset that I am an IBM employee, not an IBM spokesman. My opinions are my own, though my position at IBM assures that they are informed.
I read an InfoWorld article this morning that discusses the press kit you're distributing and I'm writing to tell you that I, and virtually everyone else in the industry you purport to represent, is appalled by the stance you're taking. You are doing a disservice both to the industry and to the country as a whole.
Your press kit tells the world, first, that the IT industry is incompetent. You're saying that we are incapable of making electronic voting equipment that is properly designed for the task, and that we have to resort to blaming the users for not knowing how to use the systems, rather than performing proper requirements analyses and user testing to assure that such a crucial system -- a system designed to be used by volunteers without formal computer education -- will in fact function as designed.
I understand that the makers of the current crop of voting machines have botched the job in virtually every way imaginable, but if you want to support the IT industry you should properly be calling for them to use the appropriate tools to fix the problem, and to get assistance from others where needed, not working to convince the world that all of the IT industry is as incompetent as these few companies.
Even more seriously, though, your press kit will lead journalists to believe and report that the IT industry in general is in favor of e-voting when nothing could be further from the truth. Outside of the small handful of companies currently in the business of making voting machines, IT engineers are nigh-universally opposed to purely electronic voting. Moreover, if there is anyone at all in the IT security industry who thinks it's a good idea, they haven't spoken out. The senior IT professionals who have the deepest understanding of how one would go about creating a secure, trustworthy electronic voting system say, unanimously, that it cannot be done.
Papering over the failures of the current crop of voting machines paints the IT industry as incompetent, and supporting purely electronic voting, in the face of expert opinion that it cannot be done securely, damages both the industry and the nation. Please stop. Instead, you should be pointing out that more responsible portions of the industry are pushing for the creation of voting machines that produce paper ballots, are designed to be foolproof and are adequately tested both for security and usability prior to deployment.
Thank you,
Shawn
--
Shawn E. Willden
Senior I/T Security Architect
IBM Global Services, Global Smart Card Solutions
[ e-mail and phone elided to avoid massive spam ]
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"this is the ITAA?"
For the most part the ITAA == Professional Liars Association.Remember them making all those tech worker shortage projections right in the middle of the dot com collapse? 1.6 Million, 900K, then 600K.
At the same time the tech industry was laying off workers faster than you can imagine. They did it to promote their H-1B agenda.. Note: They're still at it.
Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage...."The congressional General Accounting Office found ``serious analytical and methodological weaknesses'' in the [ITAA/Dept. of Commerce] reports.";
The ITAA was counting all the positions held by Computer consultants and contractors as UNFILLED!!
Yikes !!!
---
Now for a little bit about the ITAA with electronic voting and Mr. Miller's pitch to the electronic machine manufacturers. August 22, 2003, Democracy for Sale, CHEAP!
"Harris Miller (ITAA) Gives the intro spiel about the company and how it can help the industry stave off short-term attacks" from academics and "activists".
"Harris: .. And there can be two scenarios there: The companies may
want to hide behind me, they dont want to say anything... frequently
that happens in a trade association, you dont want to talk about the
issues as individual companies. We have that issue right now with the
Buy America Act, for example in congress. No company wants to act like
its against Buy America -- even though theyre all against it so I
take all the heat for them."