forces them into using an alternative accessible voting system. As in so many other situations (think: text-only pages), the reality is a separate and unequal voting experience. This can be true even when everyone in an election district uses the same DRE system. Noel Runyan, a blind elections advocate, has documented his own DRE voting experience since 2004 and says poll workers have been successful only twice in setting up the audio voting mode without assistance [ 3]. Even when poll workers are prepared, the systems don’t always cooperate. Ultimately, the combination of poorly designed systems and poorly trained poll workers discourages all kinds of voters from participating at the polling place.

Another consequence of the shift to paper ballots has been a proliferation of usability problems caused by poor design and virtually no usability evaluation. Some of these design flaws are serious enough to potentially change the results of an election. Two reports by the Brennan Center for Justice, Better Ballots and Better Design, Better Elections, showed that tens or hundreds of thousands of votes are lost or miscast in every election year as a result of poorly designed ballots, and that the risk is greater for older voters, new voters, and low-income voters [ 4].

What is particularly sad about
this is that there is no reason for it.
We have the knowledge and skills
to create ballots that work. The
federal agency for elections, the
Election Assistance Commission
(EAC), worked with AIGA’s Design for
Democracy project to create tested,
usable ballot-design templates
(bureaucratically named Effective
Designs for the Administration of
Federal Elections; www.eac.gov).
Local election departments that
have adopted the templates have
been effective in helping voters
mark their ballots as they intend.

Innovative Work on Verifying Election Results

There is a benefit to all this paper: to be able to audit and recount an election. As the Cuyahoga (Ohio) Election Audits site ( http://cuyaho-gaelectionaudits.com/) points out, both pre- and post-election audits should be a routine part of election administration. Their goal is not only to ensure an accurate count, but also to detect election fraud or other procedural problems, such as simply not including all of the ballots in the totals. Audits are mandated for close elections in many jurisdictions. Unfortunately, audits are also expensive and time-consuming, so they have been the topic of a lot of debate and subsequent recommendations.

When the Brennan Center examined overvotes on New York’s paper ballots in the 2010 elections, they found a chilling pattern: “Polling places with high concentrations of poor residents and language minorities had the highest overvote rates” [ 5]. In the Bronx, almost one-third of the election districts had overvote rates higher than 1 percent ( compared with rates of less than 0.25 percent in other places), reaching “staggeringly high” rates of as many as 20 percent of the votes cast in one polling place. Even more astonishing, officials did not investigate until May 2012 (after running another election), when they discovered that it was not voter error: The ballot-scanning systems were misreading the ballots [ 6]. The lesson here is that auditable paper records are valuable only if they are used.

One of the more exciting develop-
ments is a concept called risk-limiting
audits, developed by Philip B. Stark
and Mark Lindeman. Instead of a
simple formula such as “Audit a
random sample of 5 percent of all
ballots” or “Audit an election when
the margin of victory is less than 1
percent,” risk-limiting audits take
into account the number of votes
cast, the margin of victory, and the
desired confidence level to audit
a very small number of ballots to
determine whether a full recount
would lead to a different outcome.
It’s received a lot of attention as an
economical way to increase confi-
dence in elections, and has had a
successful pilot in California [ 7].

March + April 2013

interactions

More Flexibility, More Convenience

As our lives have become more
mobile, we expect to do more things
wherever and whenever we like.
Voting is no exception. The past
decade has seen an enormous rise in
what’s known as “convenience vot-
ing”—ways to vote outside of the tra-
ditional election-day polling place.
They include:
• Vote by mail. Oregon and
Washington elections are conducted
by mail, with ballots mailed to reg-
istered voters. (Voting centers at
election offices are used as polling
places for accessible voting.)

• Absentee voting. This form of voting by mail used to be reserved for those with approved excuses, such as travel or disability. In a growing trend, many states now allow “no excuse” absentee voting, so anyone can choose this method.

• Early voting. In 32 states, any qualified voter may cast a ballot, in person, during a number of days before Election Day. All but 15 states offer either early voting, absentee voting, or both.

• Military and overseas voting. The 2009 MOVE Act made it easier for overseas voters to participate by requiring that voter registration and absentee ballots be available electronically. Voters mail the