A User-Centered Approach to the Design of Electronic Voting Systems

Electronic voting systems should not focus only on ballot casting and recording. Instead, a user-centered perspective should be adopted for the design of a system to support information gathering and sharing, deliberation, decision making, and voting. Relevant social science literature on voting is used to develop requirements. A prototype is presented that supports extended information browsing using filtering from ballot materials and voter profiles. The system supports information sharing and participation in electronic dialogues. Voters may interweave information browsing, annotation, contextualized discussion, and ballot markup through extended time periods. Draft prepared for the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC), February 2003. Please do not A long overdue movement is finally underway to develop and implement electronic voting systems for the United States. While this move is welcome, the proposals to date should be considered disappointing from the point of view of proponents of user-centered methods. In particular, the vote casting and recording process is being singled out as the only activity to be supported electronically. While this is an importan