Poor touchscreen design causing voting errors

Electronic voting machines are causing all sorts of problems in early voting. In some cases badly design touchscreen systems are to blame. Excerpt from the Decatur County Chronicle:

Wanda and Barney Blasingim similarly said they tried to vote for McCain but the machine switched the vote. 

“I noticed the problem immediately,” Wanda said Monday. She says she touched the “button” for McCain a second time and the problem was corrected. Her husband said he asked for assistance from election workers and was told the error sometimes occurs when a person’s finger touches close to the line of the box the candidate’s name is in.

While Blasingim maintains that his finger was not on the line, Election Commissioner Rick Box said the trouble may be that when a person is standing in front of the machine, it may appear their finger is poised over one button but it is actually closer to the button above. 

“The way the machine is set up, when you are standing in front of it and seeing it at a certain angle, it looks like you are touching the middle (of the button) when you are actually touching the line above it,” Box said. 

Box and fellow Election Commissioner Grafton Dodd tested the machines on Monday. Dodd could not be reached for comment but Box said he found the area of the screen where the buttons for President are located are extremely close together. He blames the problem in part on poor design by software programmers, and adds that there may be sensitivity issues with the screen itself.

Link: Machine problems frustrate early voters.

These are blindingly simple problems that could easily have been avoided with good design and a little testing. (Not to mention that touchscreens are probably not a good choice for voting machines in the first place.)

The Usability Professionals Association has a Voting and Usability project that has been doing a commendable job in trying to bring more attention to this issue and find solutions. Clearly we're not there yet, though. 

Cyrus Farivar at Salon has a roundup of these reports: Early e-voting results in vote flipping in three states so far. It's sad to see the common "blame the user" reaction surface in the comments.

Update: The machine in question is the iVotronic from ES&S. They have video and Flash demonstrations at the link. Assembling the device looks a bit complicated -- I wonder if some of the parallax problems might be due to people setting them up differently.

See also Wired's Threat Level blog, which is tracking e-voting problems.

Comments

[Peter]

This is one of the cases where good old mechanical buttons on the right side of the screen would work best.