I have attempted to vote on Sequoia Edge II DRE machines in five elections.
1. March 2004
The first time, in March 2004, the poll workers were never able to get any of the machines at our polling place rebooted with the audio-assist feature working. After 45 minutes of struggling with the systems, we gave up and I had to have someone else do my voting for me. Clearly, these Sequoia Edge DREs were not designed correctly to be operated by poll workers lacking high levels of technical sophistication.
2. November 2004
My experience voting on the Sequoia Edge II DRE with the audio-assist feature in the November 2004 election illustrates the problems faced by voters who are blind or have low vision when attempting to vote on Sequoia Edge II DREs.
2.1 Starting Up: Reboot; Finding a Chair; Intermittent Sound; Sample
Ballot in Wrong Order
After signing in and getting my voter smart card, I had to wait eight minutes for officials to manage to reboot the audio voting machine. The polling officers had been using it for visual touch-screen voting, as there was a very long line and just five voting machines for our combined two-precinct polling place.
I had my notes in braille. Because there was no table surface for the notes, the poll workers had to find me a chair so I could read my notes with the braille on my lap.
The volume control on the front of the Sequoia Edge II keypad was not working well and resulted in scratchy and intermittent sound. By the time I got the volume set to where I could hear it, the introductory message had already finished the English instructions and was off into other languages. I was not sure what I should do, so I finally gave up and pressed the Select button several times. This eventually got me to the language menu, where I was able to select English and get started with my ballot.
Once I got started, the first major problem I had was that the ballot on the Sequoia Edge II voting machine was not in the same order as the printed sample ballot. When my wife pointed this out to the chief poll worker, the poll worker was surprised to see the difference and said maybe that would explain why it was taking most voters longer than expected to vote. Because my notes were done in the order of the sample ballot, I had to do a lot of hopping around in my notes and be very thorough and careful listening to the machine. In contrast to what we had been told, the list of candidate names was spoken in alphabetical order.
2.2 Reviewing: Can’t Stop It; It Reads Everything
It took me 30 minutes to work my way through the ballot and make my selections. After that, I had quite a bit of trouble getting into the review mode to get a full list of my selections. When I did, it went on and on, for 23 minutes, like a long, uncontrolled drink from a fire hose.
The review function read each item, and then at the very end said what my selection was for that item. It even threw in the details of what the fiscal impact would be and took forever. This is completely backward. It should announce the name of the item, then state my selection, and then read the rest of the information for that item. Also, I should have the control to press the arrow key to move forward or backward through the items without having to listen to all the text about every item.
When I did find that I had made a mistake in my selections, I had to wait until the end of the whole review process to correct it, instead of being able to stop, make the change and then continue with the review where I left off. I did not want to abort the ballot- verification review to make a correction and then have to start the long, tedious review all over again from the beginning.
2.3 Time-Outs: Dumped Back to the Language Selection Menu
At one point, as I was nearing the end of the ballot, I was dumped back to the language selection menu. I found out later that this was because I hadn’t hit a key in quite a while and the Sequoia Edge II has a time-out function. I hadn’t hit a key for a while because it was taking a very long time to read out the ballot summary!
This is terrible human-factors design. If a system is trying to present a helpful prompt when it senses an overly long delayed response from the user, it should never bounce the user to a different place in the menu system. It might prompt the user, but it should then leave them at their previous position to minimize confusion. Furthermore, the time-out should not begin until the system has finished reading out its message — in this case, after the whole ballot review. For a scary minute, I was afraid I had just lost my ballot and would have to start all over. I re-selected “English”; pressed the Select key several times; and, fortunately, was returned to my previous location in the ballot.
2.3 Corrections: Have to Unselect First
When I later attempted to change one of my selections from “no” to “yes,” the machine would not let me select “yes” until I had first gone to the unwanted choice and
deselected it. This was very awkward and confusing. It is poor human factors design for anybody, but especially for those using the audio-assist feature. Many voters using the audio-assist feature would not be able to navigate this difficult review and correction procedure.