The 2000 US Presidential election will be remembered for many reasons, but principally the question of voting procedures and all kinds of deviant “chads” – hanging, pregnant etc – in the Florida count. This was a superb illustration of the problems connected with a complex information system, and gave academics in the University of Kent at Canterbury’s Computing Laboratory an excellent teaching opportunity. They made the subject of their annual poster competition: how to devise a better Presidential vote-counting system. The results were impressive. Eighty student groups entered and thought up better, misinterpretation-proof systems, some with imaginative names such as the Touchscreenator, the Voting O’Rama, the Electrovote and the “Who wants to be a President?” voting system.

The Palm Beach County voting system is typical of modern information systems which are complex and involve detailed interaction between people, organisations and technology. Sometimes they emerge from nowhere, sometimes they’re based on an existing system which becomes computerised, but most are specially designed. The study of Information Systems is a core foundation course for Computer Science students in UKC’s Computing Laboratory. As Sally Fincher, computing lecturer, said, “By responding to events in the world, removing the artificial distinction between what happens in universities and what happens in business, we allowed our students to demonstrate that they could design professional-quality systems.”

Students also learnt something of the history of vote-counting. In the nineteenth century, Dr Herman Hellerith invented an electromechanical vote-counting machine. This took perforated cards for input, and was used in the 1890 US census to save time. Interestingly, the Palm Beach voting system used punched-card technology similar to that proposed by Hellerith, who went on to found the company that became IBM.

In designing their systems, UKC students came up with an inventive range of approaches better suited to the 21st century. Submissions included: on-line, touch-screen voting; systems for people to vote via mobile phones (so that disabled and house-bound voters would not be disenfranchised); OCR (Optical Character Reader) systems; systems which relied on picking up information on bar codes or magnetic strips (like the London Underground ticketing machines). One enterprising group focussed on the necessary trustworthiness of a voting system and based their system on the Lottery. They corresponded by email with the Florida Lottery Board, whose system apparently “runs like silk, handles more than 50 million transactions every single week”, has an established check and backup system and no disputes over results.

Other groups concentrated on the steps necessary in the casting of a valid vote and one group separated the production of a vote from the act of casting it. You would go to a kiosk to produce a voting card – which you could do as often as you liked until you got it right to your satisfaction – and then took that card to the voting station where your eligibility to vote would be checked and your vote lodged. As Sally Fincher said, there’s always next time. “We would be happy to recommend them to the Palm Beach County canvassing board for 2004.”

Reproduced from UKC’s news website, by kind permission of the UKC press office

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