Towards Work-Practice Modeling of Elections and the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS)

Election incidents – where the elections system fails voters – are of increasing concern with the dramatic rise in the use of computerized electronic voting machines that store vote records in computer memory. The Election Protection Coalition (EPC) used a web-based election incident recording and reporting tool called the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) developed by the Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) for the presidential election in 2004. In decades of election protection, this was the first time EPC had used networked information technology to support their efforts and provide for a publicly-accessible database of incident reports. In this paper, I describe the first phase of an ongoing project to model and simulate elections, election technology and election incident reporting. I use the context models of the CommonKADS modeling methodology to examine how the process of election incident reporting with EIRS within EPC. Using the Brahms suite of multi-agent work practice simulation tools, I then develop and simulate a model of a nominal voter voting on an electronic voting machine as a foundational step towards simulating the process of election incident reporting.