Karl Rove, ex-Senior Advisor to Bush, in today’s Newsweek giving Obama advice.

Four months ago, you took the political world by storm in Iowa. The media were agog. They called your words “gorgeous,” your victory “a message to the world.” You “made history” and Americans could “look at ourselves with pride” in “a moment to marvel.”

Four months ago, your candidacy made me realize how I’ve destroyed the Republican Party for a generation.

Times change. The six weeks leading into Pennsylvania were difficult. You excelled at raising money and gaining endorsements, but got weaker as big problems emerged. Before you can fix them, you must understand them. In Pennsylvania, you won only 30 percent among Catholics and 29 percent among white working-class voters. Defections like this elect Republicans.

I’m grasping at straws, and I enjoy confusing a Primary and the General Election.

Even liberal commentators who adore you warn you can’t win with a McGovern coalition of college students and white-wine sippers from the party’s left wing. Saying small-town voters cling to guns, faith and xenophobia because of economic bitterness hurt you; it reinforced the growing sense you don’t share Middle America’s values. So did asking about the price of arugula in Iowa, dismissing the “true” patriotism of people who wear a flag lapel pin, being “friendly” (as your chief strategist, David Axelrod, put it) with a violent, unrepentant ’60s radical and having a close relationship with an angry pastor who expressed anti-American sentiments.

I just love bringing up that Arugula story and reminding you that, yes, a flag pin is all you need to be patriotic.

You argue the son of a single working mom can’t be an elitist. But it’s not where you start in life; it’s where you end up. After a prestigious prep school, Columbia and Harvard, you’ve ended up with the values of Cambridge, San Francisco and Hyde Park. So you’re doing badly in Scranton, Youngstown and Erie, where ordinary Americans live.

At least when Bush attended Ivy League schools, he didn’t become smart or anything.

HERE ARE SIX SUGGESTIONS FOR WHAT TO DO.

1. Your stump speech is sounding old and out of touch. You made a mistake by not giving the bored press (and voters) something new last Tuesday when you lost Pennsylvania. Come up with something fresh that’s focused on the general election. Recapture the optimistic tone of your start and discard the weary, prickly and distracted tone you’ve taken on.

Keep changing your message to stay fresh.

2. When you get into trouble, pick one, simple explanation. And stay with it.

The truth is not important. Don’t change the message, even if all evidence points to the contrary.

3. Your lack of achievements undercuts your core themes. It’s powerful when you say America is not “Red States or Blue States but the United States.” The problem is, you don’t have a long Senate record of working across party lines. So build one.

I am making things up and ignoring your significant bi-partisan achievements because I’d like you to go bury yourself in Senate work so people forget about you.

In the coming months, say that you’ll appoint Republicans to your cabinet and get a couple to say they’d serve.

I need a job cause McCain ain’t gonna win.

Highlight initiatives Republicans can agree on. Most importantly, push for a bipartisan issue now before Congress.

Bipartisan rocks when the President is a Democrat.

4. You speak of the “fierce urgency of now” that calls leaders to confront important challenges. Sounds good, but people are asking, what urgent issues have drawn your enormous talents? It’s counterintuitive, but spend less time campaigning and more time working the Senate. Pick a big issue and fight hard for it. Win or lose, you’ll give your argument substance.

Really, please, just go bury yourself in Senate work. For goodness sake, stay off the TV!

5. Stop the attacks. They undermine your claim to a post-partisan new politics. You soared when you seemed above politics, lost altitude when you did what you criticize. Attacks are momentarily satisfying but ultimately corrode your appeal.

I am Jack’s amused sense of irony.

6. To answer growing questions about your inexperience, people need to know, in concrete and credible ways, what they can expect from you as president. That’s missing now. And don’t think those position papers written by academics and posted on the Web do the job. They have a check-the-box quality to them.

You wrote a whole paper! Elitist!

Americans want to see your passion and commitment to things they care about, in ways that give them confidence you’re up to the job. They can smell when something is poll-tested and focus-grouped, not from the heart.

I am confusing you with Senator Clinton.

The only problem is, the Bush administration, building on the good work of the Clinton administration,

I really hope Hillary wins the nomination.

You’ll have to do both your homework and occasionally something that’s difficult for you (and most other politicians): admit you don’t know.

Oh god, my hypocrisy is too much even for me.

You have talent, intelligence and tapped into something powerful early in your campaign. But running for president is unlike anything you’ve ever done. You’re making mistakes and making people worry that you’re an elitist. So while you’ll almost certainly win the nomination, Democrats are nervous about the fall. You’ve given them reasons to be.

I am high as a kite.

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The conference was a lot of fun. Spent quite a bit of time discussing security with Collin Jackson and Tyler Close. The main topic of the day was, of course, cross-domain requests, and the conflict between the W3C specification and the recent out-of-the-blue Microsoft proposal. I have some thoughts, which I’ll post next.

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So this is a (harsh) criticism of some folks on the Left and their attitude towards Science. It’s about how Science can be inconvenient, not just to the oil companies, but also to the hippies, yuppies, to you, and to me. Science has an annoying tendency not to follow any ideology, and a true scientist is one who can accept a failed hypothesis when confronted with the facts. You don’t get to pick and choose your evidence.

Let’s start with Bill Maher, a fantastic comedian whom I watched regularly until an insane pseudo-medicine rant a few weeks ago that turned my stomach. Bill argued that the reason we get sick and need drugs is because of “the swamp” of bad food (i.e. meat) that we eat:

I would never get the flu on a plane
[...]
You all look at me like I’m crazy…

Yes, Bill, you are crazy. If you’re sitting next to someone with the flu on the plane, no matter how little meat and much tofu you’ve been eating over the last few years, you’re going to get the flu, and if it’s a bad case of the flu, you might die. That’s how biology and germs work. The idea that somehow we have evolved into perfect beings who never get sick, that germs wouldn’t themselves evolve and find ways to reproduce and survive, is preposterous. This truth, supported by hundreds of years of medical evidence, might be inconvenient to folks at PETA who like to exaggerate the factory farming issue (which is a real issue). But it’s true nevertheless.

Bill continues:

What about the idea of side-effects? We see ads about drugs all the time on the news.
[...]
If you’re taking these drugs and you get these side-effects, that’s not the cure.

Of course drugs have side effects. That’s why drugs are typically not prescribed without good cause, because there’s always a downside. Doctors will prescribe a drug to you when they believe the positive effect of the drug significantly outweighs the potential negatives. This is clear and obvious to anyone with medical training or to someone, like me, who just asks their primary care physician a few simple questions. Bill: couldn’t you at least ask a doctor about this before going on your rant?

Interestingly, Bill’s rant here indirectly makes a good point: non-doctors, like Bill Maher, are ill-equipped to understand these drug ads. The magazine-based drug ads seem even worse to me: have you read the 2, sometimes 4 pages of fine print that follow a drug ad? Does anyone, really? Isn’t this a sign that maybe we’re targeting these ads at the wrong audience? That’s an issue worth discussing, Bill. Stick to the policy, and please leave the science to the scientists.

Vaccines

In medical school, my wife was shown graphs of childhood diseases and resulting deaths over the years. The trend was unmistakable: Republican administrations de-fund vaccination programs, diseases rise sharply, Democrats re-fund them, diseases drop. But again, this is not a post about Republicans. This is about how Democrats can be just as bad. The latest hip thing is the belief that vaccines cause other problems, in particular that some mercury-based preservatives (thimerosal) in vaccines (the MMR vaccine especially) cause Autism.

This theory was pushed by an RFK Jr. piece in Salon and Rolling Stone a few years ago. Sadly, the piece is full of exaggerations and statements taken out of context. But the story is back in the news now, because of a recent ruling by the vaccine court, which agreed to pay the medical costs for the family of a little girl who developed autism-like symptoms after receiving a number of vaccination shots.

Except… here are the facts that her parents agree with: the little girl has an extremely rare underlying (and at the time, undiagnosed) disorder, 9 vaccine shots were administered at once because she had missed some earlier (a practice against which most doctors strongly warn), and her disease is “autism-like”, but it’s not autism. In other words, we know what happened to this little girl: she had an extremely rare condition which, when combined with the excessive vaccination shots, triggered a sequence of events which led to brain damage. Blaming the vaccine here is a bit like blaming an antibiotic because some people are allergic. Should you test for and monitor the possibility of an allergic reaction? Of course. Should you forgo antibiotics altogether, letting thousands of people die from TB, pneumonia, etc..? I hope not.

The evidence against the MMR-autism link is extremely strong. The most compelling is that, since the mercury-based preservative was removed from vaccines in 2001, the rate of autism diagnosis has continued to increase at the same “alarming” rate in the US and two other countries. Experts agree that the increase in autism diagnosis is not an actual increase in the disease, rather it is an increase in the medical community’s understanding of what constitutes autism-spectrum diseases. We’ve always had Autism, we just didn’t know how to diagnose it.

Unfortunately, like most negative evidence, this kind of result is particularly difficult for most people to process (even scientists, who can get very emotionally attached to their hypotheses). We still don’t have an actual explanation for Autism, and we’d like someone to blame. The idea that we know nothing about how this disease comes about is unsettling. We don’t know what causes Autism, and that’s extremely inconvenient. But we do know it’s not vaccines. That’s the harsh truth, as best as Science can tell.

And the vaccination situation is getting worse. The New York Times reports on a trend in California to not vaccinate kids at all. This is, in no uncertain terms, insane and irresponsible. These parents actually hold “measles parties” to have their kids infect one another so they gain disease resistance the “natural way.” Like Bill Maher, these parents are forgetting that “the natural way” means certain death for a sizeable chunk of the population. The purpose of vaccines is to get the natural immunity without that pesky “side-effect” of death.

In the case of vaccines, this insane reasoning finds comfort in the particular state of the world we’re in: most kids are vaccinated, which means the viral pool is low and even unvaccinated kids don’t get infected, so parents don’t see the downside. But with more unvaccinated kids, the pool will increase, and the damage will spread even to the vaccinated kids (because vaccines are not 100% reliable), and more dramatically to the kids too young to get vaccinated.

A number of pharmaceutical companies have misled and continue to mislead us. But that doesn’t mean that all drugs and medical interventions are bad. It just means one should be cautious. The danger of some of the new drugs is that there isn’t enough research to substantiate their benefit. The danger of not vaccinating is that there’s overwhelming research that proves the enormous benefits of vaccination, both individually and to the population at large.

It’s about the research. It’s about the science. It doesn’t always fit some nice consistent ideology. It’s inconvenient. But it’s the truth. And since we live in a world where the truth has real consequences, we have to learn to deal with the inconsistencies in our mental models and be good scientists. Otherwise, we have no leg to stand on when criticizing folks with different ideologies who twist science to their liking.

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• not accept contributions from lobbyists an Political Action Committees
• abolish of earmarks
• increase transparency
• publicly finance elections

I’m pledging three out of four: I’m not so sure about the abolition of earmarks being the key problem. If we had great transparency about earmarks, they might not be so bad. Maybe I’m misinformed. Happy to be proven wrong and upgrade to four stars. But for now, I’ll try to maintain some sense of individuality (I’m already a Lessig groupie as it is).

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Most voting officials can’t possibly imagine how a voting machine might incorrectly count votes. After all, it’s been tested! They know, in the abstract, that computers can be “hacked”, but that, in their mind, would require sophisticated technology that only blockbuster movie budgets can afford. In the HBO Bev Harris documentary (75% great, 25% painfully misleading), a voting machine is hacked in front of an election official’s eyes: ballots are scanned, and the wrong total shows up. The official actually breaks down in tears. It’s as if a fundamental law of physics, a pillar of her life, has been shattered: oh my goodness, the machine cannot be trusted!

This is hard for computer scientists to understand. Really, it is. I’m still trying to understand why that voting official broke down in tears. Really, it was that surprising?

And then tonight, I turned on the TV to watch American Idol results (yes, I’m a fan, go David!) I was a few minutes early, and found myself watching the end of some awful Fox show where normal people are strapped to a lie detector, asked brutally personal questions in front of their family and friends, then told whether or not that answer was truthful. If the lie detector claims the contestant lied, she loses all, and the show is over. “Have you ever slept with someone in order to further your career?” “No!” Sorry, the machine says you did, you lose $100,000.

And suddenly, I got it. As a kid, I remember movies with lie detector tests, and I clearly remember that, when a person and a lie detector disagreed, of course I thought the lie detector was right. Sure, now I’m a scientist, and I know not to trust my feeble human instincts: lie detectors can be better than random, but not by much.

In the end, I think human instinct goes like this: the machine has no emotions, the machine is logical, thus the machine cannot be biased and cannot be wrong when it comes to factual issues like “did she lie?” or “how many people voted for Bob?” Picture it for a second, even if you’re a computer scientist: if a lie detector test says someone lied, and they vehemently deny it…. your first reaction is to believe the lie detector, isn’t it?

That’s why computer-based security is so hard. Because, by default, we trust the machine. Even as computer scientists, we quickly forget that it’s just another human being behind the curtain.

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I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search I came across G-Archiver, I figured what the heck I’ll give it a try.

[...]

then I noticed that every time a user adds their account to the program to back up their data, it sends and email with their username and password to his personal email box!

Ouch. Big Ouch.

Meanwhile, there’s good news: Google now provides a more open, and thus more secure, API to your contacts. In the near future, Facebook will be able to request authorization to your Google contacts, rather than ask for your gmail password. You’ll only have to enter your gmail password at the Gmail web site.

I suspect Yahoo will follow shortly. But Facebook? Probably not yet. They thrive on locking down your social network at Facebook. But I suspect in the long run, they’ll feel significant pressure to become more open.

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Doesn’t some part of you still believe that there are special moments in the world? Special people who catalyze and give a voice to a feeling that has been quietly building for years? When Kennedy pointed at the moon, when MLK stood on the steps of the Lincoln memorial, when Reagan talked about morning in America - didn’t these people shift the world around them just a little bit? Didn’t the right speech at the right time change you and how you saw the world?

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On election day for the last 4 years, I try to put aside my political preferences and my incessant blabbing about voting equipment, and I work as an election clerk at a polling station. In 2006, I worked as a precinct warden in Boston, and before that as an election clerk in Boston and Cambridge. I’ve been asked whether I get anything out of it, especially now that I’ve done it a few times, and the answer is a resounding YES. I find the act of voting exhilarating, and the ability to directly help someone cast their ballot particularly fulfilling. Also, I can’t imagine reasoning about election equipment and processes without the regular sanity check of actually being a poll worker.

Tuesday was my first time as a California poll worker. The big deal this year: touch-screen voting machines were recently de-certified by Secretary of State Debra Bowen after an in-depth security review performed in cooperation with UC Berkeley. There was no time to deploy an alternative, so voters cast paper ballots into a cardboard ballot box. Only at the end of the day were the ballots collected and scanned at a central county location.

Some thoughts, in no particular order.

Poll Worker Training in Santa Clara County is very good

I received 4 to 5 hours of material available in a particularly simple and well organized web-based training system. This was followed by a 90-minute in-person session where, instead of sitting through a boring lecture, we were split into 5-person groups led by an experienced instructor who went through every detail of the process, letting us handle every piece of equipment including the setup and shutdown of the one electronic voting machine each precinct retains for voters with disabilities. Only after the session were we given detailed manuals, so that we wouldn’t be distracted during the session. And the manuals are fantastic: they clearly outline everyone’s role, contain checklists for every major event, and include the crucial “What If” guide that details the step-by-step for every odd eventuality during the voting process. After my training, even with a process quite different from Boston’s, I felt quite comfortable and ready to be a poll worker.

There are always oddities in a voting process due to conflicting requirements. For example, each precinct retains one voting machine for voters with disabilities, but the poll worker cannot question a person’s disability claim, so anyone who asks to use the machine should be allowed to use the machine. However, if only one person votes on the voting machine, then there is an anonymity problem when that machine prints out a vote count at the end of the day. So, the law says that if one person votes on the machine, at least 5 people must vote on it…. but the Secretary of State says that no one should be forced to vote on the machine!

Fortunately, the poll worker training was very clear on how to address this annoying contradiction: at the beginning of the day, leave the voting machine folded up in a corner. If someone asks to vote on the machine, then open it up and display it prominently, so that other voters will be tempted to use it and the 5-person minimum will likely be fulfilled. You cannot tell voters what to do, but apparently you can make subliminal suggestions. Funny, but really, what other reconciliation is there to this problem?

So hats off to the folks who do training for Santa Clara County, I was quite impressed.

Secretary Bowen deserves much praise

Voting activists and academics often don’t realize how difficult it is to take away an electronic voting machine from a public that’s become accustomed to them. Voters were disappointed. Some complained that “things change every year!” and wondered “why are we going back to the stone age?” Poll workers moaned about “all of this paper” with good reason: ballots had to be stocked in multiple languages and, in this primary election, multiple party types. With 4 languages and 7 parties, that’s 28 ballot types. Counting left-over ballots at the end of the day was one heck of a party.

Plus, in a contested race like the current primary fights, there are bound to be problems, and there are bound to be dozens of ways of blaming those problems on the Secretary’s decision to go back to paper. With a record turnout and dozens of non-partisan voters opting to vote in the Democratic Primary, we ran out of Democratic paper ballots at 7pm, one hour before poll closing. Thanks to a prepared field officer, we were granted immediate permission to use sample ballots as a replacement, and to open up to the public the lone electronic voting machine supposedly reserved for voters with disabilities. Though it was a close call, everyone was able to cast a vote.

Interestingly enough, once voters had the option of using the electronic voting machine, a majority chose it over paper, except when the line was too long (a single voting machine can be quite a bottleneck). Only one voter specifically expressed his happiness about paper voting, declaring “I’m glad those stupid electronic voting machines are gone!”, eliciting confused looks from my fellow poll workers who seemed to think this guy was a nutcase.

De-certifying the electronic voting machines was the right decision given he reports commissioned by the Secretary, but it was a particularly difficult political decision. Secretary Bowen is to be praised for her courageous decision and her ability to pull together a temporary solution in under a year.

Damn You Vote-By-Mail!

California is pushing all of its residents to vote by mail. We were told in training to issue vote-by-mail registration cards to all voters who showed up at the precinct. We also received a massive sign to post at the polls informing voters that “voting by mail is more convenient and secure!” Most of us poll workers forgot to hand out the registration cards, and I wasn’t all that upset about it, given my strong dislike of vote-by-mail because of its coercion risk. But it’s quite clear that the Secretary of State is pushing this solution, and that a number of paper-ballot activists are endorsing this move since, hey, it’s by mail, so it’s paper, so it must be good…

I don’t know if we can ever reverse this trend. Voters were upset to “downgrade” to paper ballots from touchscreen voting machines. Imagine how difficult it would be to tell them that their “no-fault, permanent vote-by-mail status” is, well, no longer permanent and now requires a good reason. I wonder if Secretary Bowen, even given her courage and willingness to cooperate with academics, would be willing to go there. This is, by far, the issue that worries me the most about voting: bad voting machines can be fixed, poor voting processes can be tweaked, but voter expectations of vote-by-mail convenience are going to be impossible to fight.

To the Secretary’s credit, it’s understandable why vote-by-mail is appealing. Poll workers make mistakes, precincts change and voters show up to the wrong location saying “but I’ve always voted at the fire station!” Ballots are long and complicated, making in-precinct voting stressful and prone to uninformed decisions. Running a polling place like ours, with all of the logistics, coordination, and setup, is quite tedious and expensive for all of 288 votes (our count for the day.) One poll worker even remarked “I can’t wait until we can all vote from the privacy of our own homes.”

The problem, of course, is that voluntary privacy is vulnerable to coercion, and coerced elections are not democratic. I just wonder what it will take for folks to understand this and and whether it’s even possible anymore to convince voters of this need, especially when everything else in life is available online.

Ron Rivest’s concept of pre-voting may be the right solution here.

It’s not easy being an election officer

There is much to coordinate, and there is so much that can go wrong, all usually at the tail end of a 16-hour day. On-edge voters are easily ticked off, and it takes just a handful to report “election irregularities.” One voter wanted a sample ballot, but we could not find any in English (they were packaged such that only the voter registration forms on their backs were showing, so we assumed they were stacks of voter registration forms.) He immediately complained that we were “really disorganized!” In the confusion, I handed him a ballot for the wrong party. When, in the booth, he realized his candidate was not on the ballot, he returned, quite angry that I “had not listened to him.”

A number of voters that reached our precinct had visited one or two or sometimes three precincts before coming to ours: clearly the other precincts weren’t doing a very good job directing them, and I’m sure we made our share of mistakes directing voters to other precincts. Trying to find a voter’s street on an approximate map where different sides of one street vote in different precincts, all while 20 people are waiting in line, is a bit stressful.

So be nice to your poll worker. It’s not easy.

Complete the … what?

We used old-school optical scan ballots, where voters are expected to complete a broken arrow near the candidate of their choice.

Why is this so contrived? Because this is old technology. But yeah, a user interface nightmare.

Can we figure out the provisional ballot already?

The provisional ballot is a federal mandate that says that anyone who is not on the voting roster for any reason can ask to vote, and that vote will be counted when the voter’s identity is verified and all cast votes are reconciled. It’s the same thing everywhere, and yet no one seems to get it right. Just like in Boston 2 years ago, there was confusion in Santa Clara as to whether a provisional vote cast in the wrong precinct would count. I thought yes, two poll worker colleagues thought “no,” and the central office said “yes.”

In truth, the provisional ballot is a pain in the butt. It requires a good 2-3 minutes of time to set up, and while you’re doing that, the voting line is usually held up, especially in Santa Clara where, given the number of tasks required to check in a voter, there is a tight pipeline process that blocks easily. The county probably doesn’t like it, given the extra work required to reconcile provisional ballots with roster lists of people who voted in person and by mail, etc… So, while voters must have the right to vote provisionally, it’s a lot easier if we can find a way for them to vote normally. If a voter shows up to the wrong precinct, should she be sent to the right precinct or simply allowed to vote provisionally? Theoretically, it doesn’t matter, but practically speaking, it’s easier for the voter to vote provisionally, but it’s easier for voting officials to send the voter to the right precinct.

I think the provisional voting process needs to be significantly improved and clarified, but the conflicting interests here are going to make that difficult.

The Obama campaign was on the ball

At 3pm, we got a visit from two friendly college students. “We are with the Obama campaign, and we just wanted to ask you what you do if a non-partisan voter asks to vote Democratic.” I answered “we give them a Democratic ballot.” They smiled and said “Thanks, we were just checking, because we’ve heard reports that some precincts are forcing those voters to vote provisionally.” They thanked us for our work, and left. Two hours later, another Obama staffer came by to double-check. Obviously independent voters are crucial to Obama, and so is getting their vote counted right away in time for the news reports, not next week once nobody cares.

At 6:30pm, two more Obama staffers came by and asked “are you doing okay with ballots, we’ve heard reports that precincts are running low?” We checked, and no, we were fine. 5 minutes later, we got the mad evening rush, and by 7pm, we were out of ballots. But we were ready for it and checking, so we we were able to call our field officer and get instructions right away.

That’s pretty impressive. The Obama campaign not only kept track of issues, but dispatched folks to help election officials. Of course, this was all to their advantage, but their approach actually made our jobs easier.

Most people don’t understand security

One of my poll worker colleagues lectured me for 20 minutes on how the Secretary of State doesn’t know what she’s doing, because “the poll workers are always watching the voting machines,” and “you’d have to be a programmer with lots of time on your hands to hack into those machines,” and “since we’re always watching the machines, how can they ever do it?” It is amazing how, even with how unreliable computers are today, people seem to trust machines far more than people, even when machines are obviously entirely programmed by people.

Another poll worker remarked “I hear they’re worried about poll workers hacking the machine, but if you can’t trust your poll workers, the election is insecure anyways!” How interesting. Of course, an election is considered secure not because we trust all poll workers, but because we trust that there are enough poll workers and watchers to make sure no one is screwing around. The issue of a rogue poll worker with access to a machine for long enough to corrupt it is very real. In my precinct, three of the poll workers were related. Two brothers set up the voting machine. Now, they were extremely honest and I really don’t think they did anything to that machine. But they certainly could have had they been so inclined, and no one would have known the difference.

Security is tough to explain and tough to understand. The opinions of the poll workers shouldn’t really factor into security decisions, because, obviously, they’re not trained to understand security, and most human beings are simply not paranoid enough. During a spontaneous security discussion between two poll worker colleagues, one concluded with “wow, they really come up with some intricate schemes for cheating, don’t they?”

Yes, they do. The economic incentive to cheat and coerce is extremely high. Most people just don’t see it.

My suggestions for the future

Precinct Count — California has moved away from touch-screen voting machines, and I doubt they will bring them back anytime soon. But central-count optical scan is a bad solution. We need to move to precinct-count ASAP, so that voters can get instantaneous feedback on whether or not they filled out the ballot correctly. And we need a better optical scan user-interface, e.g. filling in a bubble.

On-Demand Ballot Printing — For multiple language support, I hope we move to on-demand ballot printing: just tell me your language and I’ll print you a ballot. Printers are cheap and fast, and replacing them in case of a breakdown is trivial. This would have to be coupled with good opscan technology of course, but all of this can be done well when a precinct needs only one scanner rather than 4 touchscreens.

Streamline the Process: in Boston, the precinct lead had the specific role of taking any “special case” out of the pipeline so that the voting flow could proceed. This wasn’t implemented well in Santa Clara: each provisional ballot, each voter from a different precinct, and generally any irregular situation caused a line pileup.

Cut Down on the Extraneous Signage: we had to put up literally dozens of informational signs. It seems that every year, someone decides we need to tell voters more stuff, so another sign is added to the list. Enough with more. We need a UI engineer to come in and think about the entire voting experience. Maybe everyone should get a copy of the voter’s bill of rights on a single sheet of paper with a URL. Certainly, everyone should get a simple explanation of how to fill out their ballot immediately as they walk in the door. But the experience right now is ridiculous: dozens of signs as you come into the precinct, and no one reads them.

Preliminary Voting: we should begin to implement Ron Rivest’s preliminary voting idea right away, at least in its simplest form. Let voters fill out a ballot on their home computer, print it out, and bring it with them to the polls to cast it. It would streamline the process, make for more informed decisions, all without weakening voter privacy.

Next, the November Presidential Elections….

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