The Training Session

The hardest part about being an election day worker is not beginning the training session by pretending that you’re a member of the Exclusive Brethren, and greeting all the other Election Day Workers as if they were also members of the Exclusive Brethren. It seems like this would be an extremely funny thing to do, except that a training session for Election Day Workers is clearly not the place for sophisticated political satire of this type. Thus, our evening training session was devoted to practical matters such as how to assemble the fiendishly clever cardboard voting booths, what to stamp with your issuing officer stamp (most everything) and how to work out which electorate people are supposed to be in using the Great Big Book of Every Street In New Zealand.

We also signed an oath promising not to breach the terms of a particular section of the Electoral Act, which we were not shown. When I asked, nobody seemed to have a copy available and nobody was exactly sure what it said, but we assumed collectively that it was probably about being impartial and not telling people who to vote for. I signed it because I suspected that if I didn’t people behind me would make loud sighing noises and roll their eyes.

Upon completing our training, we were each issued with our Inconveniently Large Democracy Boxes. Among the other accoutrements of the Issuing Officer, these contained many pads of actual real unused ballot papers. Until this point I had not really thought about how the ballot papers would get to the the polling station, and it had not occurred to me that I would carry them there on my bicycle. Something about this didn’t seem safe.
After exploring a few scenarios in my head, however, it became apparent that if I were to attempt to rig an election, gaining access to unmarked voting papers would not be the difficult part. The tricky bit would be later on, when I would have to convince everybody else in the polling station to look the other way while I slipped my bundle of votes into the ballot box, and then come up with some convincing explanation for exactly where all my individually-numbered ballot papers had got to. So no problems there, really.
My Inconveniently Large Democracy Box was much too large to carry home on my bicycle, so I had to accept a lift. If you ever volunteer to help run an election, you should be aware that the Democracy Box is Inconveniently Large.

On the week leading up to Election Day, my cats and I guarded my votes from intruders. I by watching out for villains and my cats by sleeping on top of the Democracy Box. I also read my Personal Instruction Manual, which covered again the basic points of how to run an election and providing such useful other gems of advice as:

Try to wear colours that do not suggest support for any particular party.

Greet the voter and ask them to sit down.

Do not talk down to a physically impaired person or make inappropriate gestures such as patting the person on the head.

Do not give any advice on whom to vote for to any person.

Refrain from using remarks such as “do you have a license to drive that thing” or “how fast can you go” to initiate conversation with persons in wheelchairs.

It occurs to me, incidentally, that a great deal of good might be done for the cause of world peace by compiling a book indexed by ethnic group, gender, sexual preference, hair colour and so forth, and for each category of human being providing a list of weak jokes that they have definitely heard before.

The Election Day

Having transferred my papers and my issuing officer stamp from the Inconveniently Large Democracy Box to a more convenient set of saddlebags, I arrived on election day at the Bailey Road School Hall in the general electorate of Mount Wellington and the Maori electorate of Tamaki Makaurau. I wore black and brown. My allocated role was to sit behind a cardboard desk and issue special votes, which are more complicated than ordinary votes, and require a lot more stamping.

There are several ways a person may be allocated a special vote.

They may be overseas and mailing in their votes. This is not really my problem, because they don’t mail them to me. But good on them.

They may be outside the electorate they’re enrolled for. This is why I had the Great Big Book, and sets of voting papers for every electorate in the country. Most of my voters in this category were from other parts of Auckland, although I did get one from as far away as Nelson.

They may not be on the printed electoral roll that is supposed to be a list of everyone in the country who is eligible to vote. It is unfortunately not perfect, and some people find themselves, through no fault of their own, in a zombie-like limbo state of no-enrollment which can be cured by signing a special declaration form. Actually, everybody who makes a special vote gets to fill in the form. Filling in a form is really the essence of special voting, and is so important that I had to stamp it in two different places.

I also had to sign each form to testify that I, in my capacity as an Issuing Officer, had personally sighted each voter and judged them to be real. Then I gave them a voting paper, which I stamped, and a special two-sided envelope with a place to seal the declaration and another place to seal the ballot, which I stamped. After that, my stamping was completed, and the voter was permitted to retire to the privacy of a cardboard voting booth to make their selection.

There was a special ballot box for special voters, which was too small. I delegated to myself the extra duty of periodically picking it up and shaking it to help all the special votes settle at the bottom and make room for more at the top.

The Turnout

Given that we weren’t situated in the central city or near a busy shopping area or even on the main road, we were expecting to collect maybe a few hundred votes over the course of the day. As it happened, we received around 1500. It was a busy day with a steady stream of voters from opening at 9am to closing at 7pm.

Some had clearly never voted before, and were unfamiliar with the MMP system. I had to explain the ballot paper to a lot of people, covering the distinction between their party vote and their candidate vote, and answering questions about whether you have to vote for a candidate from the same party as your party vote (no) and whether you’re allowed to just vote for a party and skip the candidate vote (yes). In the past I have been a supporter of the STV system as superior to MMP, but I am now convinced that two votes is complicated enough for most people who don’t make an active effort to follow politics. If I’d had to explain how to rank candidates in numerical order as one does under STV, there would have been a very long queue.

One man was confused by the ten identical cardboard voting booths we had, and wanted to know which one belonged to which party so that he’d know which one to stand behind. Another tried to put his unmarked voting paper straight into the ballot box immediately after receiving it – apparently he had thought that his special vote declaration was the actual vote.

The closest we came to electoral fraud was an apparently recent immigrant who had to be told that he was not allowed to fill in his wife’s ballot paper for her, nor to go into the booth and oversee her vote. He did end up collecting her completed vote from her and putting it in the box himself, but we couldn’t see any sign that he’d looked at it in between.

Another fellow, apparently illiterate and with limited English, wanted my advice on how to vote Labour. He understood clearly that I could not tell him how to vote, but he needed me to point out which party on the list was Labour. The Labour and National scrutineers had gone home by that point, so I made sure that another election worker was listening and could vouch that I wasn’t providing any inappropriate information. I showed him which party and candidate were Labour, and asked if I could help him with any other parties. He said he remembered something about a church party, so I pointed out Christian Heritage for him.

Being a scrutineer is, by the way, a considerably more boring job than being an election day worker. The scrutineers are appointed by political parties to make sure the election is run impartially, and most polling places have two or three around at any given time. They have to wear a rosette identifying their party, and they are not allowed to speak to any voters or interrupt any proceedings. We had three scrutineers. For some reason the representatives for Labour and National chose to place themselves on either side of the youngest issuing officer, a young man who had to work for the whole day with the two major parties breathing down his neck. Apparently they considered him the most likely to throw the election, because they didn’t pay much attention to the rest of us. By the middle of the afternoon they seemed to have satisfied themselves of his propriety, because they wandered out of the building and didn’t return.
Our third scrutineer was a friendly woman from the Maori Party who occasionally had to be reminded gently that she wasn’t allowed to be helpful in any way, no matter how innocent. She stayed right through to the close of polling and on into the counting, and expressed some surprise that the other scrutineers hadn’t stayed for the whole process.

Counting
Democracy is a game of two halves. At seven o’clock we closed the doors, put some cardboard tables together, and began the counting process. First order of business was to open the special votes box, divide the envelopes up into piles for different electorates, and put them into larger envelopes so that more highly-trained operatives than us could work out which ones are valid and which aren’t. This was easy.
We then proceeded to the counting of the ordinary votes. That is, the non-special ones. For this purpose, we each have one or two pieces of paper with names of candidates written on them. We place any votes for our candidates on their respective piles and pass any for other candidates to the person on our right. By this means, all the votes end up in the right pile and if any get passed on by mistake they’ll most likely be passed all the way round the table and come back to you. That’s how it’s written in the Personal Instruction Manual. In practice, the first thing to do is work out who was going to count Labour candidate Mark Gosche’s votes, as it was readily apparent to all involved that this person would be doing a majority of the vote piling.
Flush with success from the rapid and efficient special-vote division, I volunteered for the Gosche pile. For the next hour or so I maintained an interior monologue that ran along the lines of “Gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche not-gosche-pass-it-on gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche gosche not-gosche-pass-it-on gosche gosche gosche…” This continued until all 1500-odd ballot papers had been counted.
Then we repeated the process for the party votes. This time I opted for the comparitvely lighter job of counting the votes for the New Zealand Family Rights Protection Party, the New Zealand First Party, and the OneNZ Party, none of whom gained the tottering heights of the Labour pile or the much smaller but still respectable National pile.
And after that we did the candidate and party votes for the Maori electorate of Tamaki Makaurau. Then we spent a while deciphering the instructions for packaging up all the votes and left the building around eleven pm.

Based on what we could see in our polling place it was clear that Labour had won by a massive landslide, and that Mark Gosche was the Prime Minister. Oddly, it later turned out that neither of these patterns was closely followed across the country as a whole.

I’ve removed a few people from my LiveJournal friends list today. If you’re one of them it’s nothing personal, but I’ve had to be brutal in an effort to reduce my list to something short enough to keep up with. I see I also have a bunch of new people who have added me as a friend, and I’m afraid I haven’t got around to reading any of your journals yet. Life is full.

University was reactivated today, after a mid-semester break that stretched on a full week longer than I had thought plausible when I arrived on campus ready for lectures at the beginning of last week. But this is not the main point of this evening’s symposium.

Among the tidings of the resumed semester was a new lecturer for Human-Computer Interaction, who began his course on usability testing with the example of a program designed to allow architects to walk through a building plan designed by an apprentice and make notes about potential problems. Actually displaying the building was a problem that had already been solved by the people who write 3D computer games, so the main task confronting the designer was figuring out how to make it easy for the architect to move around the building, look at different parts of it, and draw circles around bits that might need some work.
A less enthusiastic designer might have thought at this point that the problems of moving around and looking at things have also had a lot of work done on them by the people who write 3D computer games, and focused their efforts on the drawing-circles bit. And then gone home before lunchtime. But this particular designer was clearly of a Different Breed.

Although I was not privy to the inner thoughts of this designer, the evidence presented suggests that they must have gone something like this:

Question: How can I make using a computer to look at models buildings easy for architects?

Observation: People find things easier if they’re similar to what they normally do anyway.

Theory: Architects would really like it if they could move around and look at buildings on a computer the same way they do it in real life.

Question: How do architects move around and look at buildings?

Observation: I don’t know any architects.

Thought: An architect is a person.

Observation: I am a person.

Theory: Architects would probably do whatever I do when I want to go to a building.

Question: What do I do when I want to go to a building?

Answer: I drive to the building. In a car.

Theory: An architect who wanted to look at a building would drive around it in a car.

Conclusion: The best way for architects to look at buildings on a computer would be to make it like driving around in a car.

Further Conclusion: And it should be as much like a real car as possible, only drawn on a screen.

The result of this presumed thought process was a user interface in which you were supposed to operate an onscreen steering wheel to manouever around a building. Because tablet computers are cool, you were supposed to operate the steering wheel with a pen. To go forward you clicked on the accelerator pedal with a pen. To stop you clicked on the brake. There was, believe it or not, a gear lever with Park, Drive and Reverse. Which you operated by clicking on it with a pen. The circle-drawing part was provided by a pencil on the dashboard.

The fact that this user interface required a major re-think should probably have occurred to the designer when they noticed that their mock-up had relegated the actual building to less than half the screen, and filled the rest of it with car parts. But it did not. There was also no soul-searching reappraisal when user testing revealed that nobody could tell which way the steering wheel was pointing, and everybody ended up driving round and round in circles, unable to effectively look at buildings. Instead, this problem was corrected by adding a little arrow to one side of the steering wheel.
The point at which it really should have become apparent that the whole car metaphor was fundamentally wrong-headed was when it became necessary to provide a way for the architect to move upwards to look at high parts of buildings, and downwards to look at low parts. Except in dangerous situations like driving off cliffs or leaping over shark-filled swimming pools – suituations in which the driver must in any case concentrate on things other than looking at buildings and drawing circles on them – cars are generally known for mostly going along on the ground. Here, surely, the designer must leave aside the car-based interface, thought I.

What actually happened was that the driver added another position to the on-screen gear lever. Park, Drive, Reverse, Fly. After shifting into the Fly gear, you could then operate a second lever with two positions for fly up and fly down. Because when an architect wants to check the guttering on a house, the first thing they do is fly there in their car.

If called upon to critique this user interface, my first thought as a beginner in the field of computer usability would be that its Achilles heel is probably the bit where you fly around in a car operated by pointing at bits of it with a pen. But our lecturer is clearly more sophisticated, and showed us how to apply systematic usability theory to draw our attention to the real weak point. And it was this:

The flying car had no speedometer.

How would the architect know how fast the flying architect car was going in the imaginary computer world? If they flew too fast past the building, they would have trouble drawing circles on it to show the apprentice where an extra window would be needed. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed, and in the final version, the flying pen-operated architect drawing car had a clear, easy-to-read speedometer. It was colour-coded. It went red if you flew too fast.

I learnt so many things today that it is hard to know whether to laugh or weep.

For your listening pleasure, I present Bow Down Before Fumo, a piece of music I made with GarageBand.

Before listening to it, you should be aware that it runs for more than nine minutes, so it requires a certain degree of listening commitment. It’s particularly good to listen to with headphones, because of the mind-blowing stereo panning effects that make it feel like you’re actually there. It contains a living, breathing man-mountain of fire, so consider yourself forewarned if you don’t like that sort of thing.