Revolutionary Voice-Enabled Voting Machine Still Waiting in the Wings

After months of recounts, court battles, and controversy in Minnesota’s election of Al Franken to the United States Senate, Americans across the country head to the polls next month to decide a host of local and state contests.  And once again, voters won’t have access to Prime III, Juan Gilbert’s revolutionary multimodal speech and touch-screen voting technology; instead most voters will have to rely on the unreliable: paper ballots and outdated voting machines.

Nonetheless, Gilbert—professor and chair of the Division of Human Centered Computing in the School of Computing at Clemson University—remains optimistic about Prime III and its chances to drastically improve the accessibility, accuracy, and security of elections.

According to Gilbert, Prime III is now better than ever before: He and his team recently tweaked the system, adding new capabilities that make it even more accessible.

After learning about a voting system that enables visually impaired people to cast ballots via a keypad, Gilbert conferred with the systems inventor and added similar technology to Prime III.  The system now allows voters to utilize keypad navigation in addition to the system’s speech and touch screen functionality.

“Now you can navigate via speech only, keypad and/or touch,” Gilbert says. “And you can do it in any combination. It speeds up the interface.  It speeds up interactions for blind users.  It makes it even more universally accessable.” 

Additionally, Gilbert and his team added speech-enabled anonymous spelling capabilities to Prime III.  Now if visually impaired voters want to cast a ballot for a write-in candidate they can do so—privately and secretly—with the power of their voice.
 
“We developed a speech interface interaction to accommodate anonymous spelling via voice,” Gilbert says. 

The anonymous spelling feature divides the alphabet into groups of five letters and uses voice prompts—Is the first letter of the candidate’s last name between the letters A and E?—to help voters spell out candidates’ names.  By answering the prompts with “Yes” or “No,” users anonymously spell out a portion of the write-in candidate’s name.  At that point, the system speculates as to the full name of the write-in candidate and prompts the user for verification. 
 
“It’s not even a question any longer—our system is the most accessible voting technology ever created,” Gilbert says. “No other system can accommodate more people than we can.”

Additionally, Gilbert is pursuing a grant from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the National Institute of Standards in Technology, which have $5 million in federal funding for a accessible voting program.
“Obviously we’re going to compete for that,” Gilbert says, noting that the outcome of the program will inform how the government addresses the issue of accessible voting.

But as to when Prime III might be available to the American public, Gilbert admits that the makers of voting machines will likely not adopt his technology unless mandated to do so by the federal government. 

“Unless somebody tells them this is what you need to do, they’re just not going to do it,” he says. “They’re doing what they’ve always done and they’re content with that.  So that’s a problem.  But I think with this grant, that’s going to change things.”

“Until [the government does] that, they’re just not really motivated to do anything because [the changes are] expensive,” Gilbert adds. “I understand their perspective…that’s why this is probably going to take longer than we would have hoped.”