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Election Day: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Voter turnout could be the highest in a century

By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

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Touch-screen calibration errors

The most widely reported problem in early voting so far this year is what's known as a touch-screen calibration error. This is an issue that has popped up in earlier elections as well.

You may already be familiar with this problem if you've used an automated teller machine or a personal digital assistant. Voting machine touch screens have to be calibrated so that the computer knows what part of the screen is supposed to represent each voting choice. The problem is that the angle at which you view the touch screen affects where you touch it, so a 6-foot-5-inch voter may touch a completely different part of the screen from someone who is 5 feet tall. Another source of error: when people touch the screens with different parts of their fingers such as the fingernail. When the voting machine isn't calibrated properly for the user, you can get vote-flipping: where the voter thinks he's selecting one choice, but another one shows up on the screen.

This year, calibration errors have already been reported in early voting in Texas, West Virginia, Colorado and Tennessee. And they've made it into a widely watched Simpsons clip where Homer Simpson tries unsuccessfully to vote for Barack Obama.

Training problems

If the machines don't malfunction on their own, unskilled poll workers might just help them along. In fact, election officials in Florida have reportedly said that pollworker error is partly to blame for the ballot scanning problems already reported in Florida.

One of the side effects of having so many new voting systems in play this year is that poll workers may not know how to use them properly. This can lead to unexpected consequences that could affect the outcome of an election. In a recent study of Sequoia's AVC Advantage voting machine, university researchers found that due to a design flaw in the system, a poll worker could press the wrong button and cause an incorrect primary ballot to show up for the voter, leading to Election Day mistakes and, possibly, voter disenfranchisement.

Election equipment is certified by the federal government, but there is no user-interface testing as part of this certification process. So often, design bugs don't really show up until Election Day.

Human error

Poll workers can make mistakes, but at least they get some training before Nov. 4. Not so with your average voter.

Just ask Oprah Winfrey. Her presidential vote initially didn't get recorded when she voted using a touch-screen machine in Chicago Thursday. She talked about the problem on her show the next day, saying: "It was my first time doing electronic ... I didn't obviously mark the X strong enough or I held down too long â¬¦ when I went back to check it, it had not recorded my presidential vote."