I’ve gotten very interested in Election Reform lately, and I’ve delved into how the overall voting system works, technically but also politically and procedurally. There are so many simple and not so simple ways in which election results can be manipulated that it makes my head spin.

I was at FooCamp this weekend and told this story to many people, so I thought I’d give some pointers to this particular example of how voters using touch screen devices could be cheated out of their vote.

“But evidently there’s another version of the iVotronic interface in which pressing the VOTE button is only the second to last step. In those machines, pressing VOTE invokes an extra “confirmation” screen. The vote is only actually finalized after a “confirm vote” box is touched on that screen. (A different flash demo that shows this behavior with the version of the iVotronic equipped with a printer is available from ES&S here). So the iVotronic VOTE button doesn’t necessarily work the way a voter who read the standard instructions might expect it to.” (from Is the E-voting Honeymoon over?)

This is far from the only example…Concerned?

election reform, fraud, security