''Bless his heart... he thought all we did was push a button": Understanding Worker Challenges with U.S. Election Technology

RESUMO

This paper explores how the technologies U.S. election officials depend on also challenge their work. Every election, misleading narratives stem from errors that occur while using election technology, threatening election official safety and eroding faith in elections. We seek to understand the impact of these challenges directly from worker perspectives. This paper presents a qualitative analysis using combined interview and survey data from a total of 50 election officials representing 20 states. Our findings present design as a substantial factor in mistakes when using election technology, but other obstacles, like lack of funding and technical support, also strain operations. We show how election technology design can lead to harms for election officials and connect those harms to their negative effects on democracy. Our work emphasizes the potential for researchers in human-centered computing to support U.S. election officials-and democracy-by working towards better usability across election technologies.