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The contested presidential election has prompted harsh criticism of our polling systems and our democratic processes, but one of the most vexing problems is an issue that the computer using public has been battling for years -- an inadequate user interface.
Electile Dysfunction
by Del Miller
November 26, 2000
The troubles surrounding this presidential election have prompted any number of serious discussions regarding a variety of problems with "the system," as it is generously referred to, with which we elect our president. Proposals to retire the electoral college in favor of a popular vote are again enjoying the attention that they have sporadically received throughout the last century or so. Likewise, we are beginning to debate the arcane, state-by-state rules for counting absentee votes, the lack of standards within the poll booths and the timing of exit poll results that may influence the portion of the electorate that has yet to vote. Despite the ugliness of the situation, perhaps it will at least spark a movement for reform that will help insure that the next election will better reflect the democracy that it is meant to serve.
Election workers in Florida have sweated through a manual recount of the ballots, amidst a minefield of lawsuits, injunctions and thinly disguised partisan roadblocks. The stated purpose of these exertions is to make sure that the mountains of valid ballots are correctly counted and small errors in the machine count do not derail the workings of democracy in an election where a few hundred votes one way or another will decide the future course of our government. Unfortunately no recount can fix one of the worst problems, the fact that thousands of votes have been thrown out because of the same fundamental error that the computing public has been dealing with for the last fifteen years. The travails of the 2000 election hold serious lessons not only about our governmental institutions but about how our entire society is misled by our inability to design clear, efficient and understandable user interfaces.
The user interface of the electoral process is the ballot; a notionally simple form on which a voter records his choices in a way that can be tabulated by the underlying system and incorporated into the overall network of polling stations across the state. Just as in computing, where a cumbersome metaphor or an illogical screen layout can result in an maddeningly unworkable program, a poorly designed ballot can undermine the validity of the voter's choice and make chutney out of a political process that is already so massive as to be nearly intractable.
A Crossword Puzzle
Through some indeterminate path, officials of Duvall County and Palm Beach County settled on a user interface, or shall we say ballot, of a form called the "Butterfly." The butterfly ballot lists the candidates down two flexible, hinged sheets with the gutter between as the selection area. The ballot, simply a blank card, is slid under the gutter, behind the candidate listings, and the voter votes by pushing a stylus through a small template hole adjacent (or approximately so, as we will see) to the candidate of choice. The stylus is forced into the hole, through the blank card, punching out a piece of the card (called a chad, by the way) leaving a hole in the card as a mark for his or her candidate.
The simplicity of the approach seems beyond question but, as is often the case where theory collides with practice (particularly in the case of user interfaces), a number of problems arise in the implementation. The first issue is as simple as the manner in which the names of the candidates are listed. George Bush and Dick Cheney are named at the top of the left hand side and the voter need only punch through the topmost hole in the gutter to make that choice. Directly below the Republican offering is the Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, so it seems intuitive to simply punch the next hole down to vote for Gore.
Unfortunately, interface issues muck up the scheme: First, there happen to be five parties vieing for office and their candidates are listed across both wings of the butterfly -- three on the left and two on the right -- offset so that the second hole actually corresponds to the first slate on the right-hand page, i.e., Reform Party candidates Pat Buchanan and Ezola Foster. A Gore-inclined voter could easily see Bush's name at the top, Gore's directly below it and naively punch the second hole voting for Pat Buchanan by mistake.
How often might this have actually happened? MSNBC news reported a study conducted by Dr. David Niven, an assistant professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. The report mentions:
Despite the fact that Buchanan was the most conservative major presidential candidate, Dr. Niven found that Buchanan's best precincts were heavily Democratic areas in which liberal voters predominate. In fact, Buchanan received twice as many votes in precincts that Gore won with at least 70 percent of the vote as he received in precincts that Bush won with at least 70 percent of the vote. "The odds against such a pattern occurring naturally, without the ballot problem, are literally one in a million," Dr. Niven says. "The best statistical explanation for this pattern is that a fraction of Gore voters in every precinct mistakenly cast ballots for Buchanan. Buchanan did best in Democratic precincts because there were more Gore voters, therefore more Gore voters who could accidentally voter for Buchanan." Based on precinct totals and Palm Beach County's voting history, Dr. Niven estimates that slightly more than one-half of one percent of Gore voters mistakenly cast a ballot for Buchanan, resulting in a total of over 1,600 miscast ballots.
This number by itself is greater than the overall statewide differences between Gore and Bush.
The second problem with this user interface is one of simple geometry. The illustration here is displayed on a two-dimensional screen with choices clearly adjacent to the hole to be punched, but in reality the wings of the butterfly ballot are hinged like the pages of a paperback book -- one that doesn't necessarily lay flat when opened -- and the punch holes are recessed below the plane of the hinges. This makes the selection holes appear on a different plane than the names listed and if a viewer is not directly in front of the ballot the perspective can make it difficult to line up choice with selection. Looking at the voting machine from an angle, the holes appear shifted relative to the corresponding name and what appears as adjacent isn't necessarily so. Hundreds of voters reported seeing a hole next to both Al Gore's and to Joe Lieberman's name and then punching both selections, which resulted in voting for two candidates and thus voiding the ballot.
In heavily Democratic Palm Beach County alone, over nineteen thousand ballots were thrown out due to selection of more than one presidential candidate, whereas less than four thousand voters made the same mistake on the section for the Senate -- which did not feature a candidate on the right hand page of the butterfly. In Duval county, heavily weighted with voters also expected to vote Democratic, over twenty-thousand votes were discounted for the same reason. These numbers swamp the disputed votes that are currently at stake in the manual recounts.
What the designers forgot is that a ballot is not a restaurant menu, where diner's browse up and down and back and forth across the page comparing the various offerings and then choosing which one they like best. Voters entering a poll booth have generally already made up their minds and merely search for the name of their candidate and select accordingly; seldom do they study the entire ballot -- a process that might otherwise alert them to peculiarities in ballot design. The second error in the ballot design was an apparent lack of meaningful testing. The machines have been used for years, but never in such a close election that systemic errors might affect the outcome.
What makes this particular interface flaw so grievous is that there is absolutely no means, short of a new election, to recover the voter's intent from the ballot. Either the vote is recorded for the wrong candidate or the entire ballot is disallowed but no manner of manual recount will ever be able to divine the voter's true intentions.
Political Machine
The manual recounts that occupy the headlines have nothing to do with the above problem, The recounts are intended to at least partially correct an entirely different family of interface design defects -- those related to the physical act of punching a stylus through a card. Again, this seems like a foolproof mechanism, but once more reality dilutes the results.
For one thing, both the designer of the Votomatic voting machine and the former Palm Beach County Supervisor have testified that faulty equipment may have been to blame. They reported that due to the design of the machine, the plastic under the punch card wears out faster near the top of the ballot (where the presidential votes are cast) than further down and "could cause difficulties for voters in punching clean holes in punch card ballots."
The design of the butterfly voting machine hides the ballot from the voter, so that whether pushing a stylus through the hole actually pierces the ballot in a readable fashion becomes a matter of faith. What sort of tactile feedback should an inexperienced, unpracticed voter expect from the crunch of the cardboard? Is there a different feel for a clean punch versus an operation that makes a partially cleared hole which cannot be read by a machine? Does it matter if the sylus is not perfectly perpendicular to the ballot? Exactly how hard do you need to push on the stylus? Was there, in fact, any clear description to voters about these things or did they simply enter the booth with no idea that one could vote incorrectly?
There is an often expressed sentiment among some that these mistakes are simply the result of a stupidity on the part of the voters that should rightly disqualify their votes anyway, as if voting were less a constitutional right and more a test of ocular accuity and manual dexterity. Perhaps that might be so if only a handful of individuals voted incorrectly but in this election tens of thousands of voters, in the counties using the machine, failed to punch their ballot in a machine readable fashion - at a statistically much higher rate than did voters using other voting systems. Clearly there is something wrong with the method.
The design of the butterfly ballot is particularly evil because there isn't just one interface flaw, but a number of them that confuse the user in a variety of ways and give no feedback that a correct vote has been entered -- to the great detriment of the democratic process. But the point of this article is not so much our political process, but rather the fact that the lowly user interface has become so desperately important to us that our ability to function as a culture depends to a frightening degree upon the metaphors that sit between us and the larger world.
It Ain't Just Politics, Neither.
Life in the twenty-first century could arguably be drawn as a frantic montage of arbitrary metaphors that enable us to deal with the complexity of a fast-moving, legalistic, technological society. From telephone keypads and traffic signs to computer interfaces and the wider media, we employ a dazzling array of devices, procedures and conventions to work with our environment. They are all metaphors for the subsystems of our culture and in one way or another, they serve as our control panels for the world around us. To the extent that we allow these metaphors to be clumsy, inefficient and inaccurate we also condemn ourselves to a world that behaves in a strange and unpredictable way.
A recent study claimed that seventy-four percent of Americans were unable to effectively program their VCRs. Telephone systems, which are massively distributed computer networks, meet the user through increasingly opaque user interfaces that pack hundreds of options into cryptic controls that few of us are proficient with. Personal computers have become so feature laden that most people have no earthly idea how to use the bulk of the hardware and software sitting upon their desk. While the foundations of society aren't always shaken by such things, these instances merely hint at the cost to society of unbridled and unneccessary complexity at the user interface.
Poor design hampers not only the rate at which technology can be integrated into society but burdens us all with costly errors of unlimited impact. Poor interface design was involved in the accidents at both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and now seem to be affecting our ability to govern ourselves. The issue is far more important than the personal computer world's long running arguments about Macintosh versus Windows would have us believe.
A Brief Disclaimer...
The preceding discussion of the butterfly ballot will no doubt stir strong feelings among some readers who, I predict, will assume that I've taken sides in the heated arguments regarding how the Florida electors should be chosen.
Well I'm not. The issues of electoral procedures in this election have been complicated by dozens of technical, legal and political debates that extend far beyond the simple matter of ballot design dealt with in this story. In any case, as I've listened to impassioned arguments about this election, I've found that the only issue that really matters to anyone is whether the person speaking is a Democrat or a Republican and the facts are invariably manipulated or ignored accordingly. Nothing I say here will change anybody's political opinions anyway.
This story is simply about interface design.
Copyright 2000, Del Miller. All rights reserved.
Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com
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