ALEX SAGADY
February 3, 2004

Alex Sagady, an environmental consultant who lives in East Lansing, Michigan, discusses his online voting experience -- and the concerns it raised with him. The NewsHour Media Unit is funded by a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts

 

Online Special Reports: Media Watch Vote 2004: Media Analysis & Ad Watch Voting Technology The Debate Over Electronic Voting Jan. 12, 2004: Update: More Americans Log On For Campaign News, Study Finds Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the media   News for Students and Teacher Resources: Media Studies     Michigan Democratic Party AFSCME of Michigan SEIU Detroit Free Press	TERENCE SMITH: Now, you have voted online? ALEX SAGADY: Yes. I voted a couple of weeks ago. TERENCE SMITH: And you voted for? ALEX SAGADY: Oh, I voted for Howard Dean. TERENCE SMITH: And you said that with real conviction. ALEX SAGADY: That's right. TERENCE SMITH: Tell me how the process of Internet voting, online voting went for you.
	Some bugs in the Internet voting system
	ALEX SAGADY: Well, it didn't go smooth. I got online and got into the system, and cast my vote inside the Michigan Democratic Party system. And I got an error message immediately after I voted saying that I was not logged on, right when I was in the middle of the system after I had logged on. TERENCE SMITH: So that was a big question whether you had successfully voted? ALEX SAGADY: I wondered whether my vote was recorded or not. I had no idea. TERENCE SMITH: How'd you find out? ALEX SAGADY: Well, I started calling the Democratic Party office. Called for a couple of hours. I talked to the PR guy and they sent me to an 800 number and then they sent me to someone--you know, a technical guy. And the technical guy finally called me back the next day and said my vote was recorded. TERENCE SMITH: It was recorded? ALEX SAGADY: Yes. TERENCE SMITH: So in fact you'd succeeded, but you saw things on the screen that made you believe maybe you hadn't succeeded. ALEX SAGADY: Well, that's right. I was told immediately after I cast my vote that I was not logged in. TERENCE SMITH: Right. What does that tell you about this as a system for voting in a large-scale election? ALEX SAGADY: Well, it tells me that, you know, some geeks wrote the system that really didn't write it to the quality that, say, a credit card company or an airline would write their system for relating to the public and for registering secured [inaudible] on the Internet. TERENCE SMITH: And you've written software yourself? ALEX SAGADY: I've written software, not on the Internet, but I know better than to have something that appears that tells you that you haven't, you're not logged in when in fact you are. That was a message of very much concern to me. TERENCE SMITH: Did you make the mistake or did the system make the mistake? ALEX SAGADY: The system made the mistake. You know, I should not be able to get it to generate an error like that if I'm logged in.
	Security concerns with online voting?
	TERENCE SMITH: Does this raise concerns about the security of the system to you? ALEX SAGADY: Well, it certainly raises concerns about the, the human engineering aspect of it, whether people are going to be able to deal with this system in a, in a good way. An unsophisticated computer user is going to find it hard even to get in to this system because of the way that they have set it up. For example, here, when you, when you, you, when you type votedem2004.com, if you don't put the prefix on there all the way down to the 'https,' you will never get into the system. The average Internet user doesn't type those prefixes out. They, they just type the, you know, the address name. And, and if you try to do that, you'll never get in. And that may be one of the reasons why they have recorded so few votes at this point. I saw some statistics the other day that they sent out a lot of votes -- or a lot of ballots, but they don't have a lot of votes in yet. TERENCE SMITH: Well, that's true, but of course there are a couple of days to go. In other words, 120,000 people have gone online to obtain a ballot. The [party] had sent out those ballots. Now some 20,000 of those have already voted, about half online and half by mail. So there's obviously a very large number still to vote. ALEX SAGADY: That's right. The other problem that I saw in the system is that you cast your vote, and then you get to what I call talk-back screen that shows what vote you've cast, but your vote really isn't recorded at that point. You have to hit an additional button, you know, a 'submit' button. That might be below the bottom of your screen. You might have to scroll down to see it. And, and an unsophisticated user might just close the window thinking they voted after they get the talk-back screen, without hitting that 'submit' button and recording your vote. And so I think that, you know, someone ought to check on the number of under-votes -- how many people were in the system but never recorded a presidential vote. TERENCE SMITH: So you think they've got a little work to do on the system? ALEX SAGADY: I think the system should be designed with the same quality level and user ease and human engineering that, that an airline or a credit card company brings to their systems. I see what they did as, as amateurish from the human engineering standpoint. TERENCE SMITH: Alex, this is the message you got back? ALEX SAGADY: Well, sometimes you get this message back, sometimes you don't. If you only enter the address votedem2004.com, which most people are going to want to do, you get this message back. I mean, that's a hostile message: "This page must be viewed over a secure channel. The page you are trying to access is secured with Secure Sockets Layer SSL." I mean, you know, and then they say, well, the suggestion -- you know, try typing https-colon and so forth, you need an address. But this is a very unfriendly-looking thing, this message you get back here. The average person's going to just throw up their hands and wonder, you know. This is technical information for support personnel. Go to Microsoft Product Services, search for the words 'http' and '403.' I mean, that's not a user-friendly -- that's not like Northwest Airlines or Citicards or any kind of system that you're dealing -- you never get anything like that. TERENCE SMITH: Is this especially frustrating for you as a Dean supporter, since there was a presumption -- accurate or not -- that many people online were, were supporting Dean? ALEX SAGADY: Well, I'm an advocate of competence in doing something like this no matter who you're supporting. I'm especially frustrated that, you know, Dean has really urged people to vote online and -- in some ways, maybe voting online is a bad thing because you don't record your vote, there's no ballot. It invokes a lot of the same issues that the black-box voting Diebold-kind of approach. A lot of people are worried about that kind of thing in the country right now. So, it's something of a concern to a lot of people who are very, very much concerned about the democratic process and votes, especially after Florida.

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