Project groups should be no fewer than two or three students. Some suggested topics are listed below; if you have an idea for a project not listed here, please contact the Staff.
Field study of how long it takes to vote, to be done for both early and regular voting in the 2006 election. This should also include some post-election surveying on user satisfaction and trust.
Study of human verification and tabulation of paper records for accuracy and rate. That is, how long does it take for people to verify VVPATs? How accurate are they in detecting errors? How long does it take to count such records, and how accurate are typical human counts?
Analysis of straight-ticket voting. What are the implications of different laws for how users can vote? For example, how do users specify exceptions? What happens when there are races which do not include that party?
Election Day exit polling to study voter turnout by type of voting (mail-in, in-person early voting, in-person election day voting)
Per-election survey of voters and validated post-election study: Who says they are going to vote and who actually votes?
Voter mobilization and campaign messages: If someone asks you to vote will you vote? (pre- and post-election survey coordinated with campaign activities of candidates and referenda advocates).
There is a real chance the 22nd congressional district election will be dramatically affected by a usability issue, that of write-in votes. (For legal reasons Republican candidate is running as a write-in.) The 22nd spans three counties (Harris, Fort Bend, and Brazoria.) How does the different handling of write-ins in the different counties affect the outcome?
Add features to the prototype Rice VoteBox system (examples: speech recognition, VVPAT printer, audio output, etc.)
Post-election auditing / reconciliation software. We have real data from ES&S elections and some primitive analysis tools that can be extended in a number of ways to look for anomalies; this could also be done as part of the VoteBox project.