Volume 2, Number 2

Authors of accepted papers for Volume 2, Number 2, presented their work August 18–19, 2014, at EVT/WOTE '14, which was co-located with the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '14). As part of our commitment to open access, this issue of the USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems (JETS), and the individual papers presented at the workshop, are free and openly accessible for download below.

Download JETS Volume 2, Number 2 (complete PDF)

April 2014

Do Voters and Poll Workers Differ in their Attitudes Toward E-voting? Evidence from the First E-election in Salta, Argentina

5:00 pm

Julia Pomares, Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth; Ines Levin, University of Georgia; R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology

We provide an analysis of voter and poll worker perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of a new e-voting system vis–à–vis traditional ballot-and-envelope voting in the 2011 election in Salta, Argentina. The results of this comparison provide new insights into how poll workers perceive the implementation of new voting technologies and show that both points of view need to be taken into account when assessing new election technology. We found that speed is perceived to be the most important advantage of e-voting; and more so for poll workers than for voters. This is not surprising since speed is an aspect of a voting technology that directly affects the workflow of poll workers. We also found that poll workers expressed more intensely negative attitudes towards e-voting than voters, especially in relation to difficulty of use and lack of training. Finally, we found that both voters and poll workers placed more importance on usability than confidence issues. This is an unexpected finding since election authorities have identified confidence in the integrity of the election process as the main trigger of the adoption of the new voting technology. Analyses like the one conducted in this paper should be an integral component of the evaluation of the implementation of new voting technologies and introduction of important procedural changes. 

 

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Making Voting Accessible: Designing Digital Ballot Marking for People with Low Literacy and Mild Cognitive Disabilities

5:00 pm

Kathryn Summers, University of Baltimore; Dana Chisnell, Center for Civic Design; Drew Davies, Oxide Design Co.; Noel Alton and Megan Mckeever, University of Baltimore

This research began with a question about addressing a broader range of accessibility issues in voting than the standards in the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) require. The VVSG standards cover accessibility for low vision, blindness, and cognitive disabilities. But what if anyone could mark their ballot anywhere, any time, on any device? While the likelihood of voters voting on their own devices may be remote in the current elections environment, it is likely that election jurisdictions will begin to use consumer off the shelf devices as the voter-facing part of voting systems soon. Thus, we narrowed the scope of our research to prototyping an accessible, responsive, Web standards-compliant front end for ballot marking that would be accessible to voters with low literacy (a previously ignored voter audience) or who had mild cognitive disabilities. The final ballot interface is based on principles of “plain language” and “plain interaction.” The ballot interface is available under a Creative Commons license at anywhereballot.com. This paper reports on the rapid iterative testing and evaluation (RITE; Medlock et al., 2002) we conducted and the lessons we learned about designing a digital ballot interface for people with low literacy or mild cognitive disabilities. 

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A Systematic Approach to Analyzing Voting Terminal Event Logs

4:45 pm

Laurent D. Michel, Alexander A. Shvartsman, and Nikolaj Volgushev, University of Connecticut

This paper presents a systematic approach to automating the analysis of event logs recorded by the electronic voting tabulators in the course of an election. An attribute context-free grammar is used to specify the language of the event logs, and to distinguish compliant event logs (those that adhere to the defined proper conduct of an election) andnon-compliant logs (those that deviate from the expected sequence of events). The attributes provide additional means for semantic analysis of the event logs by enforcing constraints on the timing of events and repetitions of events. The system is implemented with the help of commodity tools for lexical analysis and parsing of the logs. The system was rigorously tested against several thousand event logs collected in real elections in the State of Connecticut. The approach based on an attribute grammar proved to be superior to a previous approach that used state machine specifications. The new system is substantially easier to refine and maintain due to the very intuitive top-down specification. An unexpected benefit is the discovery of revealing and previously unknown deficiencies and defects in the event log recording systems of a widely used optical scan tabulator.

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