Usability and Accessibility of Electronic Pollbooks

HiBy 2017, there was wide interest in using e-pollbooks to improve election administration. These products were developed in an open market without regulatory standards, leaving the vendors freedom to design the product, and the user interface, in many different ways. Those differences can have a significant impact on how easy it is for poll workers, who work a very long day, to quickly and accurately complete the check-in process and other associated activities, so usability is an important feature of an e-pollbook.

Perceived benefits of e-pollbooks

• Faster check-in times during Election Day
• Better “customer service” features, such as helping voters find the correct polling place
• Increased accuracy of the voter roster, because it can be updated at the last minute, or in real time during the election.
• Reduced time needed to update voter records in the central database after the election

Concerns about e-pollbooks

• Introducing more technology into the polling place
• Acceptance by poll workers
• The cost of purchase and integration into election administration
• Security and election integrity issues of new technologies

Voter check-in is the core usability challenge

Because the basic check-in scenario is repeated over and over during an election day, the most important usability attributes of e-pollbooks are the efficiency and accuracy with which poll workers can complete the interaction. Efficiency is important because checking in voters is one of the bottlenecks that can cause long lines at a polling place.

Status indicators lack consistency across systems

There are many different styles of icons and choice of indicators. Although red-amber-green or blue is often used for color coding status indicators for voted-problems-ready, there is not a lot of consistency across e-pollbooks.

Accessibility was not addressed by most vendors

At the time of this landscape analysis, very few of the vendors or election office designers mentioned accessibility. Accessible e-pollbooks can enable people with disabilities to work as poll workers — which is also a good way to support voters with disabilities better.

This research was conducted by Lynn Baumeister, Whitney Quesenbery and Shanée Dawkins (from NIST).

The goal of the project was to understand current interface designs and interactions, and how e-pollbooks could be evaluated for usability. Information was sourced from demonstrations of e-pollbook systems, poll worker manuals and training materials from several jurisdictions, and reviews of reports from election officials about pilot studies or other projects that consider the use of e-pollbooks in their jurisdiction. Specifically, demonstrations were with:

• 20 state and local election officials
• 11 models of e-pollbooks
• 4 systems built by election departments

The focus was on the usability for poll workers, as well as how election staff uses them before, during, and after Election Day.