October 23, 2004
Accidental Bush Votes
The Travis County Democratic Party has a memo about some voting errors.Basically what happened is that voters were picking "straight democrat", and then finding that the ballot had them marked down as a Bush/Cheney vote (which they were then able to correct before submitting the ballot).
When pressing ENTER after marking Straight Democrat, some voters inadvertently turned the SELECT wheel one click through the ballot while meaning to go to the final "PROOF" page. If you hit ENTER at that point, your cursor is over the first candidate on the ballot: Bush/Cheney.Interesting, eh? That's either bad UI design by a nonpartisan, or... really good UI design by a Republican...
Try user error. I live in Travis county, and voted the first day of the early voting. These machines have been in use in early voting and primary voting for over 2 years now. They are not manufactured by Diebold, nor do they use touch-screens.
Instead, these machines have a mechanical scroll wheel (kind of like the original iPod) with a finger hole indentation (I guess that makes it more like a rotary dial). There is an obvious notch at each partial turn of the dial where the wheel will stop moving without exerting force to continue. Immediately to the left of the scroll wheel is the SELECT button, a rectangular button. To the left of that set of interface elements are the PREV and NEXT buttons shaped like left and right arrows. Finally, on the far bottom left of the interface is the CAST BALLOT button (in bright red plastic vs. the other grey plastic interface elements).
Best of all, once you complete your ballot entries (either by selecting a choice for each, or scrolling or hitting NEXT after the city's referendum options), you get a full list of all of your choices. In table form. That you can scroll to each choice and hit SELECT to go back to that section of the ballot.
If you ask me, all the talk about problems with Diebold got everybody a bit spooked about the rest. For anyone who wants to go check out our electronic ballot, there's a demo of it linked on the manufacturer's manufacturer's page
Posted by: Mike Ford at October 23, 2004 03:24 PMNice. This is one of those instances that shows how cool weblogging is. Someone in portland posts what they heard about vote machines in Travis County, Texas, and someone from the county happens upon it and clarifies. Cool.
tunesmith, oddly enough I've been reading this blog since this post. Plus, Curt posts about a lot of things that interest me which led me to adding his feed to NNW. I've also got a bit of a Portland connection (about 3 or 4 ex-Austinites in my group of friends chose to move to Portland).
Travis county is going to Kerry (it's a little dot of blue in a field of red). It went Bush in 2000 by 5.21%, but Nader pulled 10.37% of the vote here. It's still going to be close, though.
Posted by: Mike Ford at October 24, 2004 10:06 AM