Convened by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science
Main | Participants
The introduction of new voting technology, especially the recent spate of
adoptions, was triggered by a series of administrative and legal disasters
associated with the 2000 election in Florida. The impetus behind the
influx of new technology was a concern about a loss of public trust and
confidence in the American electoral system. The main issues highlighted
in the 2000 elections were concerns about whether voters’ intentions were
recorded accurately, as most notably in the case of the “butterfly” ballot
used in Palm Beach County, as well as whether repeated handling of some
kinds of ballots, specifically punch cards that had hanging, dimpled,
and pregnant chads, could produce reliable totals of how many votes each
candidate received.
Since the 2000 election, several public pollsters have collected data
about the level of confidence that citizens have about whether their votes
will be counted accurately and whether the results can manipulated to
produce a desired outcome. When the 2004 presidential election rolled
around, for example, only 35 percent of a national sample of 920 “likely
voters” interviewed in a CBS News poll a week before the election indicated
they had “a lot” of confidence that the votes would be counted properly.
In a mid-October poll, 60 percent of the respondents said they were “very”
or “somewhat worried” that officials in other parts of the country would
try to “manipulate the vote counts to favor their candidate” while one-quarter
expressed the same level of concern that officials “in their area” would
do the same. Just before the 2006 election, the Gallup Poll reported
that only 28 percent of a sample of 1,002 adults felt “very confident”
that the votes would be accurately cast and counted in that election,
not any difference from 2004. Almost half (47%) felt “somewhat confident”
about such accuracy.
Public attitudes about various aspects of acceptance of new voting technology
are best viewed in the context of a broader body of research that deals
with general attitudes about science and technology as well as studies
of how the public responds to the adoption of specific new technologies.
In brief summary, this research suggests that the acceptance of technology
is a function of a number of factors that include personal characteristics
such as education, a general set of attitudes about science and technology
as well as their role in society, personal experiences with the technology,
and confidence and trust in the specific technology. This research provides
a framework or context within which we can better understand reactions
to the new voting technology, employing the following model.
Figure 1. A General Model of Acceptance of New Voting Technology
In order to pursue these relationships, we collected data
under the auspices of the Time Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences
(TESS) project. In a sample of 1,214 respondents interviewed late in
2005 and early 2006, we used a series of randomly administered vignettes
designed to capture the effect of three different aspects of the new voting
technology - access cards, paper receipts and methods for transmitting
vote totals - that might relate to voters’ confidence in the electoral
process as a function of the use of access cards, the use of a paper receipt,
and different transmission technologies for sending vote totals.
In a preliminary analysis, we observe that overall, respondents were
reasonably confident that their votes would be accurately recorded. This
general confidence in accuracy was moderated by the presence of a paper
receipt in the voting vignette. When the voting description included a
paper receipt, respondents were more confident their vote would recorded
accurately. The mean confidence scores (adjusted for the covariates) are
3.19 (SE = .034) when a paper receipt is mentioned and 3.03 (SE = .034)
when it is not (where 1 = “not at all confident” and 4 = “very confident”).
Although the effect is only two tenths of a scale point, the sample size
is large enough so that we can detect even this subtle effect: respondents
are sensitive to the potential benefits of a paper receipt for insuring
accurate recording of votes. At the time the data were collected, the
media had given some attention to the issue of voter verification of electronic
voting though the coverage was not as widespread as was when the 2006
election approach. The effect may well be larger if the data were collected
today.
Voters’ confidence in the accuracy with which their vote was recorded
was also sensitive to the method of transmission. Respondents did not
begin our experiment already concerned about transmission of vote tallies,
but if the voting vignette mentioned transmission – particularly over
the Internet – this increased respondents’ concern. More specifically,
respondents’ confidence was highest when there was no mention of transmission
and lowest under either of the internet transmission descriptions. If
the transmission process was described as copying data to a CD that is
taken by a courier to a central location, this seemed both to make respondents
aware of the transmission issue and to reassure them that their votes
would be accurately recorded; CD transmission led to confidence that is
indistinguishable from confidence when no transmission was mentioned.
However, Internet transmission led to reliably lower confidence than no
mention, whether the transmission is encrypted or unencrypted.
When respondents were asked to evaluate the likelihood that someone could
figure out how they voted, they reported greater likelihood when an access
card was present than when it was not. While overall respondents were
not very concerned that this will take place, they do seem to have some
concern that access cards (as we described them) could compromise anonymity.
The good news is that the observed effects are small in the initial stages
of the deployment of the new technology. However, the data analyzed here
were collected outside of a general election campaign. But it remains
to be seen whether media coverage of the 2006 election, the first in which
there is relatively complete change in voting systems, will change this.
This research report is being completed at a time when the last details
of the 2006 election are not yet known, and the canvassing and recounts
are not yet complete nor all of the results certified.
While the 2006 election generally looks pretty clean, partly due to the
use of more computerized equipment to produce accurate tabulations that
diminish the prospect of uncovering serious arithmetic errors, there have
been a few incidents suggesting important human error. In Sarasota County,
Florida, in Katherine Harris’s House district, there were 18,000 “under
votes” in the House race, out of a total of about 237,000 cast and with
a 373 vote margin separating the two candidates. This high rate of undervoting
appeared on one kind of touch screen DRE machine and did not appear on
absentee ballots or early votes recorded on paper. This suggests that
human error was the probable cause when the ES&S machines were programmed.
Several widely distributed news stories like this could have a noticeable
impact on public confidence in the electoral system.
Our original model suggests an important role for the media as most citizens
will not experience problems themselves but will read about it happening
to others. This indicates the likely benefit of pursuing two additional
avenues of research. One is a systematic content analysis of the news
to confirm our suspicions about the different media frames used in the
new voting technology. Furthermore, there is likely to be some benefit
from pursuing further research based upon the third person effect: “I
don’t expect to experience problems but I know many others will.” We
will incorporate these conceptual elements in new data collections to
support such analyses.
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