7 Things That Could Go Wrong on Election Day

As the US presidential election draws near, those of us who remember the aftermath of the 2000 fiasco should feel confident that things will run more smoothly this time.

In the UK the voting process is relatively simple (unless you count last year's Scottish parliamentary elections which managed to screw it up a bit). You walk to a desk, tell them where you live, they cross you off a list, give you a piece of paper, you walk in to a booth, put a cross next to the person you support, fold the paper in half and put it in the ballot box. At 11pm (10pm for local elections) the box is taken to the counting centre and sorted by volunteers (traditionally bank staff) into piles, then counted. The first results are known after about an hour, and the majority of constituencies have announced by 4am. Large rural constituencies don't count until the next day but they rarely hold the balance of power: we know who's going to form the next government by dawn.

Not in America. As Time magazine reports, it's all rather complicated there, and the potential for another rerun of the 2000 election is high.

What they need are UN monitors service designers.

We can go to the moon, split atoms to power submarines, squeeze profits from a 99 cent hamburger and watch football highlights on cell phones. But the most successful democracy in human history has yet to figure out how to conduct a proper election. As it stands, the American voting system is a worrisome mess, a labyrinth of local, state and federal laws spotted with bewildered volunteers, harried public officials, partisan distortions, misdesigned forms, malfunctioning machines and polling-place confusion. Each time, problems pop up on the margins; if the election is close, these problems matter a great deal. Republicans and Democrats predict record turnouts, perhaps 130 million people, including millions who have never voted before. The vast majority will cast their votes without a hitch. But some voters will find themselves at the mercy of registration rolls that have been poorly maintained or, in some cases, improperly handled. Others will endure long lines, too few voting machines and observers who challenge their identities. Long a prerogative of local government, the patchwork of election rules often defies logic. A convicted felon can vote in Maine, but not in Virginia. A government-issued photo ID is required of all voters at the polls in Indiana, but not in New York. Voting lines are shorter in the suburbs, and the rules governing when provisional ballots count sometimes vary from state to state. As Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 4, here are some problems that threaten to throw this election to the courts again.

The article, which is a must-read if you're interested in service design (or even just interested in what's going on in the world) focusses in one section on the seemingly trivial design of the voting forms themselves:

Until the palm beach county butterfly ballot had its 15 minutes of fame, few believed that bad design could determine the fate of the world. But then a local election official created a form that confused elderly voters, causing thousands to mark both Al Gore and another candidate on the same form, disqualifying enough votes to put George W. Bush in the White House.

Eight years later, punch-card ballots are mostly a thing of the past, but bad design lives on. This summer, the McCain campaign sent poorly designed absentee-ballot forms to more than 1 million voters in Ohio. The form included a redundant box for voters to check if they were "qualified electors." Though the box was not required by law, the Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, rejected thousands of otherwise complete forms with unchecked boxes. Luckily for the voters, the state supreme court stepped in to overrule Brunner's order, which it noted "served no vital public purpose or interest." A lawsuit has yet to be filed in a similar case in Colorado, where Republican secretary of state Mike Coffman, who is running for Congress, ruled that more than 6,400 new registrations should be rejected because people failed to check a box before providing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Again, the box was redundant, since new registrants provided all the other required information, yet Coffman has declared the forms incomplete and sent letters alerting voters that they have just a few days to fix the mistakes or be left off the rolls.

Reliance on innacurate databases, poor design of user interfaces on e-voting machines, and dodgy software that apparently switches votes and prints no paper trail... It's scary.

Read the whole article. I don't know about you but the answers seem fairly obvious...