RE: AccuVote R6 & Cancel Button

From: owner-support@gesn.com [mailto:owner-support@gesn.com]On Behalf Of Talbot Iredale
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 12:08 PM

To all support and sales people;

Well, I'm neither of these but that won't stop me.

Everyone in the field that I have spoken to has informed me that the Cancel Button on the Ballot Cast Screen must be hidden from the voters and that cancelling a ballot requires poll worker intervention.

Hiding the cancel button is not a reasonable solution. I feel pretty strongly about this. Never mind the fact that, as a voter, I think I have the right to cancel what I am doing and go home. Funny the banks don't have a problem with this.

Tell me, what is Global's position going to be when some newspaper or web page runs a story about the secret hidden button? How long will it take in a million-voter jurisdiction before the button becomes common knowledge? Next we are going to have wannabe hackers trying secret knocks on the start screen to find the "other" hidden features.

What do you think Mr. Shamus or Mr. Craft will think about our little back door? Oh, don't worry about it guys. This is the only place we have a hidden button with, by your argument, administrative functionality. Really.

Since these people have run TS elections I must defer to [their] judgement unless I hear otherwise.

Fine. But then I think we should require from "these people", at minimum, a written paragraph explaining their reasoning. I am hassled all the time about the lack of documentation for our designs. Well, lets have it. Lets have a paragraph explaining why "the Cancel Button on the Ballot Cast Screen must be hidden from the voters and that canceling a ballot requires poll worker intervention". I'd love to read it. I don't think this behavior should be undertaken without this. This is not an unreasonable request.

Second, I would like to know if there is any other system in existence that has such a hidden button. That in itself would not be a sufficient reason to accept or reject the idea, but it would help to know we are not alone in this decision.

When a ballot is cancelled what should happen to the voter card. There are three possibilities.

The shame here is that we had a perfectly good design for this without the locking reader. Removing the card gave the voter the option to cancel the ballot. But that is a dead horse.

The motivation here appears to be that the poll worker must intervene to cancel the ballot. The hidden button doesn't even satisfy that, since the voter can find the once they read about it in the paper. Here is one proposal:

Leave the cancel button on the screen.
When the user presses the cancel button, open a new screen that has a poll worker PIN, and a resume voting button.
A poll worker needs to enter the PIN to cancel the ballot and release the card.

I have to underline though, that I am at a complete loss as to why it is unreasonable for a voter to cancel their ballot. Hell, they can walk away from the machine with the card still in the machine if they feel like it. This just doesn't make sense to me.

Ken