Picture Election Day. It is probably a Tuesday (though not necessarily). Check-in tables in the high-school gymnasium sort voters by precinct, while plastic privacy screens fill the engine house of a nearby fire station. Some voters return ballots to drop boxes, while others mailed theirs back days ago. Voting remains a manual process in an increasingly automated world. It is a tactile connection to democracy that goes beyond the enduringly popular “I voted” stickers. With a little squinting, one can imagine that the earliest voters would still recognize the process, in spite of the secret ballots and orderly quiet.
Look longer, and you may begin to see the increasing role of technology in elections. Many of the voters in line registered online. Others saw a reminder on Facebook or searched for where to vote using Google. And the check-in process relies on tablet-based electronic pollbooks, which connect to the local voter registration system in real time. It may be many years before we vote from our phones, but we already live in a digital democracy.
Today, technology plays three critical roles in supporting voter participation. First, it can be the medium for inviting new voters into the process. From there, it can provide consistent, accessible election information to voters. Finally, it can modernize the voting process, providing a better user experience and creating positive feedback loops for participation. However, the same tools that provide these benefits can also serve to misinform, disinform, and suppress votes.
By highlighting examples of positive voter engagement and taking lessons from what works, we can define how and where technology is used in elections to support voters and build a more robust democracy. Lessons from these examples suggest three consistent requirements for any technology used in an electoral context. As a baseline, any technology serving voters must ensure accuracy, consistency, and accessibility. Where any of these principles are not taken into consideration, new tech runs risks of irrelevance, undermining civic trust, or even disenfranchising those it seeks to help. Where they inform technology and its usage, these requirements support a more modern, inclusive democracy.