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