Interfaces for electronic voting: focus group evidence

Electronic Government

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 369-383

  Fairweather, Ben ^a   Rogerson, Simon ^a  

^a DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

audio; colour; disability; electronic voting; equality; identification; interfaces; simplicity; undervoting; usability

Indexed keywords

EID: 84969449175     PISSN: 17407494     EISSN: 17407508     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/eg.2005.008329     Document Type: Article

References (57)

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44. Including in Eire, Belgium, the Netherlands (Ferguson, 2003), the UK and the USA (Roth, 1998, p.2).
45. As indicated above, the authors do not believe this would be a wise move in the foreseeable future.
46. On street approaches were made by professional market researchers from BMRB using a quota system to ensure those chosen were representative. Participants in the focus groups were paid a fee and also child care was funded where necessary. Northern Ireland was excluded, since the nature of politics and elections in Northern Ireland is wildly different from that in the rest of the UK. Any attempt to include Northern Irish participants would have distorted results from the rest of the UK without any benefit. Thus focus group members represented the range of voters in Great Britain, rather than the UK as a whole.
47. It may be possible to allow other languages to be seen by voters as their default language if they indicate a language preference at registration stage.
48. 5% would restrict the number of languages available for selection on the one screen to manageable numbers.
49. We are deeply concerned by proposals to allow electronic (and, equally, widespread postal) voting in contexts where secrecy cannot be assured by polling station staff.
50. For a proportion of disabled users, however, this would still be problematic. Thus the security advantages need to be weighed carefully against issues of equality in independent use for all, even if a disabled person needing assistance at this stage is a slightly less sensitive question than their needing assistance at the vote selection and confirmation stages.
51. Within the European Union elections currently take place for the European Parliament with party names and logos that are not consistent from place to place, in much the way Niemi and Herrnson illustrate in the USA. Key differences are that most (but by no means all) EU voters access media broadcasts specific to their member state, whereas the US has Union-wide broadcast media; and that European Parliamentary elections are much less significant than the election of the US president, which is “far and away the most visible election in the USA” (Niemi and Herrnson, 2003, p.323). It is unclear at present how to resolve this inconsistency in elections to the European Parliament.
52. Users were then presented with a confirmation screen that explained that a spoilt ballot would not be counted for or against any candidate.
53. Although only at 10% significance even for the clearest results.
54. Although we are aware of security concerns with this: according to Mercuri (2001, p.34) “interfacing to the Internet could be, in itself, considered to constitute a security breach, in that wide attack and monitoring opportunities are provided that would not be possible with individual DRE [voting machine] kiosks, or in a closed network setting.”
55. The evidence of Rallings et al. (1998, pp.123–125) is clear that alphabetical listing gives an advantage to candidates with surnames nearer the beginning of the alphabet even with paper ballots where all candidate names can be seen simultaneously.
56. There is a body of literature on the effects of the order of races that are voted on in a single voting session. See, for example, Kimball and Kropf, 2003.
57. Thereby thwarting many attempts at coercion and vote buying