Electioneering

Courtesy of Cryptome, Blackboxvoting's stats on Indiana's purged—one could almost call them "ethnically cleansed"—voter rolls: 1,134,427 out of an estimated 4.3 million were canceled. That's 26, kids. Notice where.

All files Located At: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/

Direct links to some of the more important files:

Interface Itself:
http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/Final/Interface.html

Process Document: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/Final/Process%20Document.pdf

Outline Document: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/Final/Outline.pdf

Hardware/Software Specs: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/Final/Stats.pdf

Flowchart: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-final/Final/Map.pdf

How to Fix a Ballot: What voting-booth materials look like is almost as important as who's running

Newsweek took a look at "Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design" in this article. Nice to see, however, that our projects are still working on topics that where this book stops short, namely web design and electronic voting. Apparently only 4 pages devoted to these topics.

"There are two significant areas that are glossed over, however: Web design and electronic voting...Fair enough, but it's shortsighted not to explore the unique complexities of information flow and hierarchy on Web sites and touchscreens with the same care and attention spent here on printed material. In successful online or electronic projects graphic design is inseparable from interactive design—"human factors" (industryspeak for how a user pokes around an electronic interface) are, at the very least, as important as what font an art director picks."

The NYT, boldly lagging behind as usual, has decided to explore the obvious by addressing how well the upcoming national electional will go. "[I]t is now harder to vote [in Florida] than in nearly every other state in the nation. Some critics predict that tens of thousands of potential voters will be kept off the rolls—many of them poor, black or Hispanic." Example:

An oversight can be as simple as failing to check what many Florida residents call the “crazy box.” It asks people to affirm: “I have not been adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting or, if I have, my competency has been restored.”

A US envoy has said Morgan Tsvangirai - aka the other guy - is the clear victor in the contested Zimbabwe election.

I suppose with all of our experience in having sane and fair elections that don't bring us to the verge of civil war, our opinion must be valid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7365578.stm

Dr Axel Bruns writes:

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present a double issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'vote' - edited by Graham Meikle
'citizen' - edited by Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders

Please select from the following options. Click here. Press start. Call the
number you see on-screen. Push the red button. Is this correct? Press one.
We all vote all day long. From ATMs to phone jail, from Digg to Slashdot,
from restaurant menus to speed dating - expressing a preference is a
constant obligation. Except, perhaps, in elections. What does it mean to
vote in the twenty-first century? Is McDonald's the only kind of franchise
that matters any more?

According to a 1 April article in Mother Jones, "The Republican War on Voting," "Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans." Great line:

Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.

Ignoring infelicities like "its usual propaganda outlets" (MJ knows its audience and, like any glossy, panders), the article's well-written and accurate as far as I know. But if there's one lesson to be learned, it's to reach for your browser when you see names like "Brennan Center for Justice"—to find out what they're all about.

The journalist's mantra is "follow the money"; the reader's mantra should be "follow the sources."

For the final deliverable, tangible....thing for this class I am going to expand on what I had last week (Well, what I had here on the blog since I wasn't there)

I'm going to be making a flash version of my management interface. Essentially being all the interface would be, it would act as if it were a machine (So...a Simulation of the interface I guess)

This is what I have so far: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-interface/Interface%20Scenes.html

And just working on a sort of poster diagramming it out: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-interface/MachineSpecs.jpg

...but you'd be wrong:

The Department of Veterans Affairs refuses to become a voter registration site under the National Voter Registration act. That means that disabled veterans living in VA hospitals in states that don't have mail-in registration will effectively lose their right to vote because they won't be able to change their voting addresses.

Upon rereading, I'm not sure how helpful this might be in terms of thinking about color for an e-voting interface, but since it was brought up I thought I might share.

Really, what should be considered is how people at polls dress. Frankly, I find most people in business casual, Sunday best, or loosely conservative dress rather intimidating due to associations created during my Catholic education. This is why I tend not to vote. It'd be much easier for me if poll workers wore muted pastel uniforms with short sleeves and no collars. That way, they wouldn't be able to ambush me and would always look ridiculous.

So, previously I was always saying something about security and usability, but nothing concrete on what I was going to do with that. Last week I finally found some direction and began working on it.

My idea is a management/administrator type interface on the voting machines. On the touch-screen one I saw in NJ during Super Tuesday there was a side-panel interface for the poll worker, so that got me thinking about integrating more things into the machine itself and securing it, trying to make the main computer used for tabulating the results an extra measure instead of the only way to check the results.

First off is my outline (From Last Week): http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering

Next (For this week) I've begun creating an interface and sort of framework for what would be included in this machine (Hardware and software specs) and creating a simple (Not fully designed-out) interface.

http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering-interface

with the Specs being at: http://daiyoukai.net/electioneering as well

Source: http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/04/05/opinion/jacobs/a4102262d2dcd6...

There are often stories of the problems with voting machines and the occasional person trying to fight for stricter guidelines to ensure that democracy, that the vote is protected. Now usually these people seem to be indviduals from a community, you don't often see anyone in power trying to really fight against these companies and fight for stricter regulations when doing so would cause them trouble.

In this article it talks about a secretary of state Debra Bowen who does just that. She fights for checking and rechecking of voting machines. Most voting machines might be checked before, but after elections tend to go untouched, but she's trying to ensure that they get checked, and fixed.

Now we just need more people to think like her and put all this above money.

This is kind of old as it aired quite some time ago, but I only saw it two or three weeks ago.

It's a simpsons episode on elections, with Ralph Wiggum becoming the leading candidate.

Source: Wikipedia
"Homer leaves work, and when he's reminded that his diet is starting, he decides to have one last binge at Springfield's Fast-Food Boulevard. After filling up, he decides to throw away his wrappers and the contents of his car in a trash can outside of a Krusty Burger, tossing away a leaky battery and a lit match. When the battery acid and match meet, they start a fire which soon causes nearby gas pipes to explode, destroying Fast-Food Boulevard completely.

At a town hall meeting, the enraged residents of Springfield demand that Fast-Food Boulevard be rebuilt immediately. To fund the reconstruction, a bond measure is proposed. As the next election is too far in the future, Mayor Quimby moves it to the upcoming weekend, making Springfield's presidential primary the first in the nation. Candidates and reporters head to Springfield when they hear the news. Lisa soon discovers that none of the candidates in the election are compelling.

Source: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5870

Sequoia voting machines don't seem to be having much left. On Super Tuesday many had manfunctioned, failing to boot-up. Apparently the "governor himself" had to wait 45 minutes in order to place his vote.

Now people are often seen as the weakest link in terms of usability and security, but truth of the matter is that it's often the fault of the machine.

Well Sequoia blamed the poll workers and voters for the problems, trying to shift the blame away from themselves. When the state wanted to turn over some of the machines for independant review Sequoia threatened with a lawsuit, and then quickly began to spread propaganda saying how much they love third-party reviews/input (Smart, real smart)

Honestly, what is with all these companies, they create faulty machines and can't even man up to take the blame. It's all about the money, and democracy suffers.

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27...

Simply unbelievable. In a state that requires a government issued ID to vote, the powers that be are in the process of revoking approximately 90,000 of them. What inspired such ridiculous behavior?... mismatched records. Simply the case of someone named "William" being listed as "Bill" on his drivers license and the opposite on his social security card would throw up a red flag in Indiana's system and lead to the ID being revoked.

How can governments go through such a process during an election year? Can this be legal? Why not wait? Is disenfranchising nearly 100,000 members of the population so unimportant?

A situation like this leads to the following types of comments:

I don't understand why people pretty much always look the other way in terms of elections in Africa. Why are the results always contested, even with international observers present? Why is their seemingly consistent violence sparked by undesirable outcomes? Is it just because they're all corrupt, backwards, and poor? Or is it a combination of a lack of infrastructure and disparate populations? Certainly every case is unique, but there are similarities. One of them is the scale. Simply put, it seems as though given the methods used in elections in Africa, they aren't secure nor are they accurate polls of the population at large.

Though remarkably, in the immediate aftermath of an election factions always seem to be split between the two dominant parties, though later things get more fractious. Does this mean a two party system is natural?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080406/ap_on_re_af/zimbabwe_elections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Zimbabwe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Kenya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Kenya

Apparently E-Voting is much more expensive than paper voting. Hidden costs! Maintenance! MONEY!!!!

The despot's heel is on thy shore,
Maryland, My Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/the-cost-of-e-v.html#more

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-ig-font30mar30,1,7655295.st...

Since last week, we have added screenshots that display the "welcome" screen of the voting interface, and a sketch of the final, "submit" screen.

We have established a simple set of guidelines that are governing our design of this interface. In particular, it is worth noting the system of various colors to highlight particular components of the interface, thereby helping establish an intuitive hierarchy. The colors work like this:

Everything is in GRAYSCALE by default.

Things that are in a selected state are highlighted in BLUE - this includes candidates that are currently selected and the current voting category (represented in the dock-timeline up top) that a user is currently in.

Categories that have been completed (meaning, the right amount of candidates have been selected), as well as text that summarizes info on completed selections are highlighted in GREEN.

Components that are tasks that the user needs to do in order to advance, the "next" navigation button as well as the final "vote" button (or possibly a slider) on the submit page are highlighted in YELLOW.

50 cent pulls support for Hillary Clinton:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/31/50-cent-no-longer-suppor...

"I heard Obama speak," he said. "He hit me with that he-just-got-done-watching-'Malcolm X,' and I swear to God, I'm like, 'Yo, Obama!'

"I'm Obama to the end now, baby!"

This blog posting "Overthrowing of Democracy from within - Pseudo Activism" most certainly feels a bit like a rant at first. However, I do think that once you get past the feeling that they are a no-compromises, do-or-die sort of group you realize that it is exactly what they are ranting against. The posting is against what they call the "Pseudo Activist" who " cry "no compromise no compromise"... all the way to ruin. It attempts to steer the legislative remedy into the ditch." Also, they make the point that a Pseudo Activist believes if "It isn't perfect so it must be evil theory".

http://onegoodmovemedia.org/movies/0803/bm032808ittakesavillage.mov

Images of the Digital Voting interface. These go together with the post below by Lev.