Public Trust and the Secret at the Heart of the New Voting Machines
Excerpt: It is interesting to consider the societal acceptance of ATM’s and their operability that has disrupted the way in which people understand the rhetoric of money as well as blindly trusting the inner workings of the machine itself (Rubin, 2005, p. 830). Was the ATM created to reconcile human error as was justified by the introduction of the DRE voting machine? What are the characteristics of the ATM that stipulate its acceptance in society; defining our behaviours and understandings of our own realities in relation to that ‘thing’?
Rubin’s paper discusses the creation and implementation of Electronic Voting Machines or ‘Direct Recording Electronic’ (DRE) designed and built by U.S. company, Diebold. Diebold had declared the source code a trade secret, claiming intellectual property rights as its tenant in keeping the DRE’s inner workings hidden (Rubin, 2005, p. 828). A 2002 Diebold security failure enabled public access to this source code online where author Ben Rubin’s viewpoint is of particular interest.
As creator of an artwork with the same title, Rubin has revealed this source code, highlighting literally the trade secret at its core by blacking out the majority of the code. Using his artwork as his base, Rubin discusses the history of voting and the company responsible for enabling this spatio-temporal shift. His paper raises questions of ethics and morality in relation to the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as well as introducing the concept of black boxing.
Several years before the DRE was introduced, Diebold acquired Global Election Systems whom over three decades had built trusted ATM’s across the U.S. (Rubin, 2005, p. 830). It is interesting to consider the societal acceptance of ATM’s and their operability that has disrupted the way in which people understand the rhetoric of money as well as blindly trusting the inner workings of the machine itself (Rubin, 2005, p. 830). Was the ATM created to reconcile human error as was justified by the introduction of the DRE? What are the characteristics of the ATM that stipulate its acceptance in society; defining our behaviours and understandings of our own realities in relation to that ‘thing’? Rubin argues the transparency of our ATM receipts and our bank statements as being proof enough to know these machines aren’t stealing money from us (Rubin, 2005, p.831) but the same could not be said for the DRE. Without use of the term ‘black boxing’ directly, Rubin lists some characteristics the DRE adopted from the success of the ATM which were used by Diebold to manipulate early questions of transparency by hiding its complexity via a user-friendly user interface design (2005, p. 830). This was where we became acquainted with the idea of design rhetoric: the persuasion via the design (user interface to reflect the familiar user interface of the trusted ATM) of the DRE and the actions (acquiring Global Election Systems) taken by Diebold.
Taking a brief look at the work of the Modernists, design rhetoric can be discussed using examples of other forms created in society to gain trust, i.e.: transparency. Transparency as a metaphor is very strong in its literality, i.e.: glass buildings housing large organisations as a powerful piece of rhetoric; these buildings were designed to reflect their participation in the rules that the public themselves engaged in. Black boxing, then, makes sense in relation to Rubin’s article as well as in relation to the rhetoric of designed ‘things’. A black box in Rubin’s case is literally a black box (the voting machine) that hides its inner complexity (the source code), attempting to rely only upon the inputs and outputs. Bruno Latour’s introduction of this idea to sociology where he uses it in relation to science and technology where the more complex systems become, the more they enable the black box concept. This relates to design rhetoric as it is the design of ‘things’ with their in-built rhetoric that can also be referred to as black boxing. So, then, design can create but also open the black box and that is where disruption and innovation occur.
References
Rubin, Ben. 2004. Dark Source: Public Trust and the Secret at the Heart of the New Voting Machines. In Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public. MIT Press, 2005. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/4358283945