Beyond Casting and Tallying Security for the Rest of - Elections

The talk opens with the 2020 Georgia election, where long lines were blamed partly on voting cards that only worked in one orientation. The speaker argues that research has focused on casting and tallying votes, while the administrative systems around them, such as poll books, voter registration databases, ballot scanners and night-of reporting, get little study. Usability problems in those systems could matter for election integrity, so the question is how common they are and how officials cope.

To find out, the team trained as poll watchers and took poll worker training, then ran about 14 semi-structured interviews and a survey that produced 45 usable responses. Recordings were deleted after analysis under institutional review board and federal protections, so no respondent can be identified. About 73% of officials reported preventable mistakes, and roughly one in five believed usability failures could change final counts. One example involved a poll book that blocked an eligible voter, where the manager cancelled instead of proceeding, leaving a vote with no matching check-in record. Officials also described hardware faults, rural connectivity gaps, undocumented procedures, and peer-shared documentation, along with harassment and exhaustion.

The speaker closes by arguing that usability failures should be handled like vulnerabilities and that non-voter-facing election technology needs independent study. Other recommendations include legal protection for election workers, blameless postmortems, and anonymous reporting of equipment malfunctions. The findings were preliminary, and the paper was not yet public, so the team asked election officials for feedback before release.