STUDY SHOWS VOTERS EASILY FOOLED BY ELECTRONIC MACHINES

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JOHN GIDEON, BRAD BLOG - A new study supports the contentions of
election integrity advocates who oppose Rush Holt's election reform bill
on the basis that it allows for the use of Direct Recording Electronic
touch-screen voting systems. Supporters of the bill claim that the bills
mandate to require so-called "Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail" printers
on such DRE systems mitigate the concerns about the machines notorious
inaccuracy and proven tamperability. The new study strongly indicates
otherwise.

In her recently released doctoral thesis, "The Usability of Electronic
Voting Machines and How Votes Can Be Changed Without Detection", Rice
University researcher and Doctoral candidate Sarah P. Everett reveals
that review screens, presented to voters at the end of the voting
process on DRE voting machines, fail to be effective.

Of 66 participants from the general Houston population, with a median
age of 45 and an even distribution of educational levels, only 32% of
the voters noticed that malicious changes had been made to their review
screens during mock election testing.

A further test was accomplished with 101 participants, with an even
gender split (51 males, 50 females), a median age of 40, with most
having either some college education or holding a degree. Of those, only
37% of the participants noticed that vote flipping had occurred on their
review screens during mock election testing.

Also shocking is that of those 101 participants 6% walked away from the
voting machine without pushing the button to cast their ballot. Instead,
they just left the voting process at the final review screen. Thus, had
this been a real election, a full 6% of the voters would not have had
their ballots counted at all.

So when only about one-third of the voters actually review their ballot
on the ballot review screen and notice problems why would anyone think
that adding a "Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail" printer to a DRE will
solve any problem? Rather than adding useless and expensive printers;
why not just get rid of these machines all together?

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4682

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