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Election Apps Choke on Election DayNovember 4

One more for the election. A few weeks ago I wrote about the nifty iPhone app from the Obama campaign, which I still think is a beautiful piece of work and the start of a new era in campaign organization.

At the time I thought that for certain the app would make a big deal about getting out to vote on election day. But when I fired it up to check this morning, I was let down.

What kinds of features should an election day mode take on? Time left before polling stations close, a map to your registered polling station, where to call and what to do if you’re turned away or witness irregularities, and of course, a way to document your voting experience and share it online. That’s all for version 2, I guess, but smart money is working on a white-label approach to this kind of application for the next elections, that’s for sure.

Another app that I’d been loving but didn’t come through today was the Slate poll tracker.

The Slate app is a small masterpiece in poll tracking, offering both just enough info for a quick stop, or in depth

Election Technology and Democracy's Long GameNovember 4

Today is a big deal in the United States. In the midst of this historic election, there’s a lot of anxious uncertainty around the reliability of the voting process as it adapts to new technologies. At home in Vancouver, we find ourselves in the tail end of a streak of elections, from the federal level to the municipal (and likely the provincial before too long), so I’ve found myself reading and thinking about how elections work as a technology.

When I say technology, I mean it in the sense I learned from reading essays on the subject by scientist, teacher and writer Dr. Ursula Franklin, where technology is not only the material tools that we use, but also the process by which we use them. Elections are about as close to an ultimate expression of that concept as I can imagine: democracy is realized through myriad tools and procedures, and exists only when it is practiced. The rules for handling and counting votes are as important as the ballots themselves, because neither the materials nor the process for operating them can produce the same results on their own.

Note that I’m not talking about the campaigns themselves, which are vastly more complicated than the casting and collecting of votes. While less complicated, election day is where the output of tabulated votes is transformed through observation and belief into an outcome of collective decision-making, spanning vast geography in a small timeframe, scaling up to a hundred million participants or more. And we thought web 2.0 was cool; the electoral mechanism itself is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

But there’s an ugly trend making its way into the technology of voting, one so familiar that we can feel powerless to change its course even though every early sign suggests that we should: polling stations are putting high-tech into the voting booth itself.

There’s enough suspense to go around for one day, so I’ll put my conclusion up front: the current and foreseeable generations of electronic voting machines have no place in democratic elections. None; nada; them and the horse they rode in on. For the rest of this post, I’ll explain how that conclusion came about.

What, Me Worry?

If you’re bracing for a rant on dishonest election officials and the ease of data manipulation that electronic voting can provide, I can’t deliver that. Though integrity and security in electronic voting machines is obviously very important and current, it’s a red herring that sidesteps the whole question of whether the machines should really be in use at all.

So let’s assume honesty in election officials for the sake of discussion. Take a few moments to watch this video showing the calibration process for a touch-screen voting machine that misbehaves across party lines:

Navigating Ma.gnolia 2October 24

Over at the Ma.gnolia blog, I’ve written on the task of re-making the global navigation menus for Ma.gnolia 2. Global navigation is one of those interfaces elements that you don’t typically notice until it fails to get you where you need to go. When it does fail, it fails with a thud. And from that, we want to make sure that major changes are thought through and don’t leave people hanging.

I found that re-working navigation for an application as large as Ma.gnolia wasn’t quite as hard as starting from scratch, but it did present some real challenges. If I have one big take-away, it would be that global navigation can’t be refactored before most of the interaction it frames has been worked out. Kind of like arriving at a destination, then plotting out how you got there, instead of the other way around.

For the Locals: Tuesday Night Product Jam at WorkspaceOctober 6

If you weren’t at BarCamp Vancouver just over a week ago, you likely didn’t hear about the little product jam session that Darren and I kicked off that fine Saturday.

The gist was simple: there are people coming to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics who need a place to stay, and there are people who live here who’d rather spend the event somewhere else, and want to rent their place out. Surely there’s a lucrative web enterprise waiting to be born of this happy circumstance? At the session we talked feasibility and high level requirements, and it went well, as you can see from our notes (props to Julie Szabo, by the way, for driving the whiteboard to help us capture the ideas).

There was enough interest to spin off a project-specific wiki, and we’ve snagged the big meeting room at WorkSpace tomorrow evening to continue creating a project scope and to see if a motley crew can put together something cool. The fun starts at 7 sharp.

It takes all types to get this kind of project off the ground, so it’s a come-one, come-all invitation, with one rule calling for constructive participation. If this sounds interesting, come on out.

And the Other Future of Electoral CampaignsOctober 3

If Obama on the iPhone doesn’t do it for you, there’s lighter fare to share today from the strange place where electoral politics and the interwebs meet.

CollegeHumor asks, what if the US election had a Facebook page? Jason Michaels offers an answer that somehow captures so very much with so little.