I came across this story from the seminal today. It is the first segment of a multi-part piece interviewing the election reform activist Dan McCrea, and he had some interesting things to say.

He points out the conflicts of interest in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, talks about how HAVA made things worse, and points out some other interesting things. However, this caught my eye:

While Florida, and to a greater extent Ohio, remain electoral mysteries, election issues in Sarasota, Florida in 2006 seemed to offer election activists the best chance they had yet had of using the legal process to obtain greater transparency in elections.

While I understand that the premise is that seeing the code might reveal something interesting I am not sure how it could ever achieve any level of election transparency. On the other hand I do think that they should have just shown the code. There might have been some unrelated problems in the code, and it would have been a minor problem to fix flaws found in the software compared to the PR disaster of not revealing the code. From what I have seen there is clear evidence that the problem was a ballot design problem, and revealing the code would have put the flawed software idea to rest.

The Herald Tribune did do an analysis for which I am unaware of a good refutation. Michael Shamos also gave a talk at UMBC about the analysis that he and a team performed on the system. While he admitted that there were some flaws none of them could have caused that particular error, and he also indicated that it was a ballot design problem. At WOTE 2007 I had the chance to meet with Ted Selker and he basically said that it was clearly a case of bad ballot design.

What I have not seen, however, are the results of a real-world test of this idea. Ted indicated to me that he was, at least, planning on it, but I’ve not seen or heard about anything since. To me it seems like a highly plausible hypothesis and it would be interesting to see the results of such a test.

If it turns out to be true it would underscore the importance of usability in a voting system — Just because it is on a computer doesn’t mean it is automatically easier to use. There should be some minimal requirements for testing each ballot design before it can be used in an election.

I look forward to reading the next segment of the interview.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Voting Policy. 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.