Our colleague Ben Adida offers an interesting recap in his blog of this week’s EVT conference in Boston.

VoComp judge and voting systems researcher Josh Beneloah presented a ballot casting protocol and touched on the issue of usability; the ability to cast a vote the way you intend to. Ben explains Josh “mentioned VoComp to point out that there seems to be a dilemma between verification and usability: can we make it look identical to a DRE?”

This brings up an excellent point, because a point we tried to make at VoComp was that usability includes two aspects;

• accuracy
• feel goodness

and more importantly that one does not necessarily imply the other. But I think people have got it in their heads that something that feels easy to use makes it more accurate. But it doesn’t require much conscious thought to push a button. So what if a DRE is less accurate even if people think it’s easy to use? Isn’t accuracy the more important attribute? Somehow I doubt people feel that way.

Kinda like the 80’s architectural trend of putting little shutters on windows - it doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to, but who cares if it looks cool?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Privacy, Security, VoComp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.