How to fix an election

Abstract

About once a month I join my fellow native Floridians in a massive group cringe as the latest piece of staggeringly shameful Sunshine State news rockets its way around the planet. The latest election embarrassment hit me harder than most Florida fiascos because Human Computer Interaction professionals and journalists were to blame, and I'm an HCI geek and an ex-reporter. We didn't learn a thing when Florida made itself the butt of barroom jokes from Stockholm to Singapore by ruining the 2000 presidential election. We made the same mistakes last week. Let's reflect on this for a moment, before we botch another election. The media overlooked the core problem behind the gubernato-rial election screwup, just as they did in the stories about the presidential-campaign butterfly-ballot screwup. This oversight will not recur if Human Computer Interaction professionals do their job, if they explain to the media and the public the importance of involving users in technology design. Here's the core problem: the vote-handling system in question doesn't work; it fails because it was not designed for the people who use it. Rather than dealing with this, most news stories focus on whether voters and poll workers were trained long enough, whether laws were broken in the handling of votes, how results were analyzed, whether there's a conspiracy afoot to steal the election, and so on. These latter questions are important but they're secondary to the core problem; whether or not you have a conspiracy on your hands, you still have a broken ballot system. The New York Times editorial page echoed most news outlets Sunday in its analysis: "...it appears that most of the problems were caused by improperly trained workers and by voter confusion ." This is like saying the World Trade Center fell because the weather got really hot for a few hours in those middle floors. Dade County may have dropped the ball in training poll workers. But when people are expected to undergo 12 hours of training before they can operate a simple ballot machine, something is horribly wrong. Reporters, like the rest of us, expect new technologies to be complicated and difficult to use. After decades of wrestling with the blinking "12:00" on the VCR, who can blame them for forgetting the whole point in designing computerized ballot systems: to make them easier to use and less error-prone than their predecessors? Why were the ballot devices …