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Comment by influxed | Hacker News Reader

>“The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,”

This is a problem with the machine and the people who made it, not the people using it. "User error" is usually an poor excuse for lazy and/or bad design.

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Reminds me of the time I worked the polls in 2004 in NC, which was (maybe still is) using electronic touchscreen voting. I clearly remember an elderly woman with very poor fine motor control. Her hand was shaking terribly. I watched her hit the "next" button and, due to the shaking, press it multiple times and skip most of the ballot.

I asked her if she wanted my help to go back and finish her ballot. She declined, saying she'd managed the vote for President and that was all she really cared about.

... and that's probably very visible as "undervotes" in the counts.

Looks like NC is going to switch machines soon:

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...

Not usually—always. How can you ever blame someone when software doesn't do what they expected it to? What should they have done differently?

And people internalize this stuff! When poorly-written software does something unexpected, they blame themselves, calling themselves "stupid" or "not good with computers". It's not you, it's us!

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