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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Two more examples that everyone ought to be familiar with- ATMs and electronic voting machines

A few months ago I met a teen (maybe 15 y.o.) who was trying to withdraw money from an ATM that had a non-touch screen. He kept failing and trying to tap on the screen.

He was doing it for his grandfather, a wheelchair user, who was nearby. The grandpa couldn't use the ATM himself because there was no wheelchair ramp. Seeing the teen's failing attempts he started asking passerby for help.

My takeaway from this story: we need more wheelchair ramps, not touchscreens.

Seconded. Touchscreens are great in many contexts but I have never liked them on atms. The latency between tapping something and the result might be the bank checking my account balance, or might be something wrong with the UI. When I'm dealing with money stuff I don't want any distracting ambiguities.

Having said that I like machines enough that I assume I can figure anything out because it was intended to be used by someone, so I rarely struggle unless it's a truly awful design. Touchscreens are way more intuitive for most people, though in cases such as you describe I wonder what the helpless people think the buttons outside of the screen are there for and why they're reluctant to try pushing them.

ATMs in my area have started to ditch the physical buttons.

I’ve never seen an electronic voting machine and hope I never will.

I suppose it doesn’t rain much in your area? Buttons tend to work even when moist. Touch screens tend to give you the wrong amount of money out of your bank account.

In New England, all our ATMs are covered or in vestibules because of weathet-related concerns, so this isn't an additional issue.

Ah, all the ATMs I’ve used in the EU are usually exposed to the elements, covered, yes, but still exposed on the sides.

This varies widely depending on the issuer of the ATM, at least in my part of the EU (SW Germany).

My banking group has (I guess) >90% of their ATMs indoors; I can only think of ever using 4 or 5 locations that were outdoors (my dataset is probably something like 100 ATMs). But there are also some banks which seem to favour outdoor, or at least have less of a strict "indoor policy".

Especially "generic" ATMs at tourist spots or train stations seem to be outdoors.

Aren't they normally resistive screens? They don't have the same issues in wet weather as capacitive screens do.

Capacitive screens also probably don't work with prosthetics, while resistive screens don't mind the material of what is being pressed by.

When did you last vote? The 2016 election is when I first experienced them. I asked to vote by paper as I wasn't comfortable with electronic voting machines, so they gave me a paper and pen to fill it out, which I was then to feed into the computer.

Not everyone lives in the US ;) Around here we cast votes on paper and then use computer assisted verification & counting.

That's how it is in most of the US as well. Fill in the bubbles, throw it through the scanner.

That's not how it works outside the US. In Germany you fill out the bubbles and throw it in a ballot box. The cobtent of the box is later counted by multiple actual people. Results are very accurate and almost instantly available after voting closes. Thousands of voting locations, properly staffed, make sure of thay. Those preliminary results are later recounted and verified.

> Not everyone lives in the US ;)

I don't see how that affects the comments you're replying to in any meaningful way. They only mentioned a particular election to establish a timeline.

> Around here

Voting varies wildly between parts of the US too.

> I don't see how that affects the comments you're replying to in any meaningful way. They only mentioned a particular election to establish a timeline.

Because many countries won’t have had a meaningful difference in election systems in that window?

Neither has the US, in large part because there's no single standard to begin with.

Commit... asked Swen... when they last voted. Now that question is only meaningful if the region Seen... lives in even uses e-voting, so Commit... seems to either assume that Swen... lives in the same country or that virtually all countries use e-voting. Either option is US-centric - the first is pretty obvious, the second is more along "we do it like that, so all the others probably do it like that as well" (I'm US-centric as well, assuming the mentioned 2016 election was the US presidential election).

It's not like this is inherently bad or anything like that, it's just a remainder that sometimes the inhomogeneous composition of the HN commenters should be considered. And as you pointed out, that's also the case inside the US.

Also, others used the opportunity to state how their country/state uses (no) computers for voting. So there seems to be some meaning to it.

Maybe it's centric to CommitSyn's experience, but I don't think it's US-centric.

> the second is more along "we do it like that, so all the others probably do it like that as well"

2016 is quite recent for a first encounter anyway, so I don't see it as "we do it like that", just an anecdote that it's spreading. No "others probably do it like that".

The way I understood is also US-centric. I'm not American. Seems like Americans are unaware of their casual Americanism

I'm also surprised to see "electronic voting machines" referred to as something everyone ought to be familiar with. I've never seen one of this type. I last voted a year ago (it was a local election); the last national election was two years ago.

I have seen the bubble sheet type, but the voter interface to those is a pen and paper.

It didn't make waves here presumably because people are jaded with politics, but people in this sub-thread might be interested in this recent story about a quasi-legal effort to penetrate electronic voting infrastructure in the wake of the 2020 election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/08/15/sid...

The 1st election I voted in was 1987 and the last was a couple of months ago. For the 1st couple of elections I used the giant old school mechanical voting booths with the levers you threw to record your votes.. Since the early 90s I have only used ballots which I filled out by hand and then ran through an optical scanner before leaving the polling place. I imagine quite a few people in the US have never seen an electronic voting machine.

Last time I voted, there was a machine which spat out a paper where you could verify your answers, which was then fed to another machine for counting.

Seems like a reasonable path to me, though I'm still a bit distrustful of the whole process (I live in Texas currently, so Shenanigans(TM) are not out of the question).

> which I was then to feed into the computer.

Not that it's directly relevant, but this phrase reminded me of this moment in Dr. Strangelove: https://youtu.be/zZct-itCwPE?t=96

That's only half stupid. The last primary I voted in I used a poorly-designed-by-committee interface which then printed out my ballot which I then fed into the scanner.

The style where it prints out a ballot which you feed into the scanner is actually not-insane. It's good for accessibility (e.g. lets visually impaired people vote without assistance) but still leaves a paper trail for recounts and things.

It is weirdly hard to have conversations about insecure voting machines these days. Progressive that care are sometimes shouted down by other progressives that are in favor of dominion suing fox. Conservatives that care are sometimes trying to justify disproven conspiracy theories about the most recent election.

It seems both sides have reason to push for voter-verifiable paper trails, but I'm not seeing a lot of momentum along those lines legislatively.

this year, by mail, in California. I've lived in the US most of my life and have never seen one.

Two more examples:

The context dependent buttons on old feature phones

The red/green/yellow/blue buttons on old TV remotes for Teletext

Military equipment commonly uses these Multi Function Displays too.

Not to mention every video game system ever.

and cockpit display systems

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