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Voting As User Experience
With the 2006 midterm elections almost upon us here in the United States, our publication of Whitney Quesenbery’s column “Creating a Universal Usability Agenda” is timely. It describes her experiences chairing the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), which is endeavoring to make voting systems accessible to all US citizens with disabilities by creating federal standards for such systems. As Whitney informs us, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires voting systems that allow people with disabilities to vote “in a manner that provides the same opportunity for access and participation (including privacy and independence) as for other voters.” This is important work.
It is ironic that, at a time when we’re making great progress in ensuring that voting systems are accessible to all, the corruptibility of those same systems has the potential to disenfranchise the populous at large. HBO is now running a great documentary about voting systems that are currently in use in the United States called Hacking Democracy. I highly recommend that you watch it. It’s eye opening.
Rather than elected representatives of the US citizenry, the corporations that manufacture voting systems have dictated the features of these systems, and some have chosen to give us black-box voting systems that provide no voter-verifiable audit trail. These systems do not meet the needs of the voting public. Voters should receive verification in print that the votes they have cast were recorded correctly, and the outcomes of elections should be verifiable through a paper audit trail. A committee similar to the one that Whitney participated in should dictate the design requirements for all voting systems in the United States.
At present, the architectures of these voting systems are proprietary and, therefore secret, which means there is no objective oversight regarding their accuracy. Some of these systems can be hacked and voting results altered, without there being any record that changes were made. If there ever was a class of software that should be open source, this is it. (Australia is way ahead of us on this front.) To ensure that election results reflect the will of the electorate, our voting systems must be transparent and the results of elections verifiable.
As UX professionals, we know how frustrated users become when systems do not work as expected. We want to make our voting systems both usable and accessible for all citizens, but we also know how important credibility is. All of the progress we’re making in the usability and accessibility of voting systems will be for naught if those systems aren’t accurate, reliable, and credible.
Please exercise your right to vote and vote for candidates that support election reform. 
