Our friends at the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group kindly invited Rick and I to give a talk at their annual general meeting in which we demonstrated Scantegrity II. We conducted a mock election of their board of directors in part to demonstrate our invisible ink printing capability as well as to gather some preliminary feedback about the voting experience.

Their response seems promising. Though not a statistically significant sample, all survey respondees indicated they were “confident that I filled out my ballot correctly.” This obviously cannot be taken as an indication of overall usability. I do however think it demonstrates at least that we’ve moved past the usability restrictions of the Punchscan ballot and are on to other topics of discussion.

Also of note was that most respondees would consider using (and/or authoring) an open source software tool for the cryptographic integrity check. I think this is the more academically interesting question. The voting process itself is a bare minimum in terms of overall usability requirements. However it is the people performing the E2E verification steps that give this technology its raison d’être, so we’d hope they would be reasonably able to understand the purpose of, and use, the receipt check/audit tools.

Photos of the event can be seen here.

Aleks and Rick speaking at the OCLUG AGM. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)

Voting with Scantegrity II. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)

Invisible ink print setup: Off-the-shelf inkjet printer, continuous-feed ink system (for bulk specialty invisible ink).

A marked OCLUG mock ballot showing confirmation codes and voter generated receipt.