Rule 2: Training Is for Dogs
One conspicuous failing, mentioned throughout the Report, was inadequate training for poll workers, employees, and other participants. If only they'd gotten better training, we're told, perhaps the outcome would have been better: fewer mistakes/less confusion/more serenity. While that may be true to some extent, I believe better training cannot solve electronic voting's problems.
There's a subtle, often overlooked, distinction between training and education. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "training" as, "to make proficient with specialized instruction and practice." The dictionary.com definition of "education" is, "the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself...intellectually for mature life."
When you're trained, you can recognize specific situations and apply a stereotyped response based on your training: If it's bleeding, apply a bandage. If it's really bleeding, apply a tourniquet and call for backup.
Conversely, education provides deeper background knowledge so that you can not only recognize a situation, but also reason toward a conclusion that depends on both theory and the situation at hand. Your reaction to a given problem won't be as rapid as that of a well-trained person, but you can handle more different situations with appropriate responses: If 10,000 are bleeding, begin triage.
Traditional polling duties, those involving pencils and paper forms, required a very limited set of skills, were easily amenable to rapid training, and were well-suited for low-duty-cycle volunteers. Electronic voting should produce identical vote tallies, but requires a radically different skill set.
As anyone who's done remote tech support, perhaps for a friend with a recalcitrant Windows box, can attest, the symptoms of a failure often have little relation to the actual cause. That's part of the dissatisfaction produced by the well-scripted folks on the other end of manufacturer tech-support lines: The solution always boils down to "reinstall Windows," simply because that's guaranteed to suppress the problem at hand. Should reinstallation blow away your data, well, that's a different problem and not one for which they take any responsibility.
Polling workers cannot be educated to the level of computer-savvy competence required to diagnose and treat the types of failures we've all become accustomed to, if only because most of them lack the background (and desire!) to attain geekhood. The alternative, training them to recognize a failure and call for backup, simply does not scale well to typical elections, as evidenced by the Report's findings.
Poll worker calls to the [support center] were not answered by knowledgeable officials...The calls...were not directed to the proper authorities who could remedy the complaints.
If the only possible response to a "machine down" situation is calling for backup, then the number of trained (if that's the right word) technicians becomes the limiting factor. It's unreasonable to expect adequate and timely backup across an entire election district, particularly during a national election. Remember that elections cannot be rerun the next day; any downtime affects the outcome.
Basically, the overall system must not transform simple, localized failures into widespread problems. As one worker put it, "...I've worked a good many years, but they have to...make it simpler for those people that are not real computer savvy."
