Improving voting systems ’ user - friendliness , reliability , & security

About half of Americans have limited confidence that their vote will be properly counted. These fears have focused attention on voting system reliability, security, and usability. Over the last decade, substantial research on voting systems has demonstrated that many systems are less usable and secure than they should be. Producing truly reliable voting systems demands more than just following the federal guidelines enacted in 2005 (which, although well intentioned, have failed to substantially improve current systems) or simply updating voting systems to electronic voting computers using monies allocated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA). In fact, HAVA has inadvertently led to the purchase of systems that may have actually increased the vote error rate. Key reforms needed to deliver reliable voting systems include substantial testing for usability, especially regarding the accurate capture of voter intent and the reduction of voter error rates, and measures to ensure the integrity of elections, such as election officials’ ability to secure ballots. Byrne, M. D. (2017). Improving voting systems’ user-friendliness, reliability, & security. Behavioral Science & Policy, 3(1), 15–24. 16 behavioral science & policy | volume 3 issue 1 2017 T hroughout the 2016 presidential election season, dark claims were floated about the election being rigged, and almost half of all Americans have limited confidence that their vote will be properly counted, according to an October 2016 survey. These fears focus attention on the voting procedures and systems used in the United States. Are they, in fact, fair, and do they give all citizens a voice, as the Constitution requires? And in the wake of the vote recount efforts by Green Party candidate Jill Stein and the Clinton campaign, with both camps voicing concerns of potential computer hacking, Americans may yet wonder: are their votes secure? The voting process has been questioned before, particularly following the contested presidential election of 2000 and the infamous butterfly ballot (see the sidebar The Butterfly Ballot From Palm Beach County, Florida, 2000). Two years later, with strong bipartisan support, Congress passed legislation called the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 to address election administration problems. HAVA allocated billions of dollars to local jurisdictions to replace outdated voting equipment. But it turned out that many of the voting machines those jurisdictions rushed to purchase, most often voting computers known as direct recording electronic machines (DREs), offered little to no improvement. In fact, HAVA likely made usability worse for some voters in terms of preventing voter errors, because some of these replacement systems were measurably worse than traditional paper ballots, the best alternative then available. The fundamental problem with HAVA is that it put the need for purchases ahead of the science. The law imposed substantial pressure on county clerks to purchase new voting systems and granted them generous budgets to do so, yet it offered almost no scientific evidence to guide them on which systems were most usable and most secure. Commercial vendors, hungry for an allotment of the billions about to be spent, rushed in with poorly designed systems. These early systems were primarily DREs. They were not only scientifically unproven to enhance voting usability but also failed to follow industry best practices for both usability and computer security that had been established in the decades prior. However, there were positive consequences as well. The contested 2000 election spurred a wave of new research on many aspects of voting, including voting system usability, election administration practices and procedures, computer security, and statistical auditing methods. For example, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (http://vote.caltech.edu/), an interdisciplinary research effort focused primarily on political science, has produced a substantial amount of valuable research on voting, particularly on election administration. For example, the idea of a residual vote—the difference between the total number of ballots received and the total number of votes cast in a particular race—came from this research and has now become a standard measure of the quality of voting systems. The ACCURATE Center (http://www.accuratevoting.org/), a 6-year interdisciplinary research center funded by the National Science Foundation, focused instead on both computer security and voting system usability. The center is responsible for the vast majority of the research on voting system usability published since the center’s inception in 2005. In addition, the center’s research has yielded ideas that will likely be incorporated into the security and cryptography architectures of future voting systems. In this article, I focus on usability, but usability is not by any means the only important consideration. A truly successful voting system must address multiple factors, such as security, usability, accessibility, certification, ease of administration, cost, compliance with election laws, transparency, and auditability. Clearly, improving and updating the country’s voting methods, practices, and administration is no simple task. Human Factors of Voting Systems Human factors is an academic discipline concerned with matching engineered systems to human capabilities. A human factors researcher, Core Findings What is the issue? After the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002, many states transitioned to direct recording electronic voting machines. While these improved usability for disabled voters, they did not improve error rates over traditional voting methods. Further usability and security testing is needed to improve the integrity of U.S. elections. How can you act? Selected interventions include: 1) Joining electoral machine research and design efforts in Travis County (Texas) and LA County (California), and across other jurisdictions, to pool resources 2) Embedding behavioral science research and insights in electoral design processes Who should take the lead? Behavioral science researchers, security experts, election officials