Vote-By-Phone

Abstract

There are a myriad of voting technologies available today, but a noted lack of remote voting methods. In this paper we explore a novel remote voting method that allows users to vote-by-phone. This method used an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to allow users to vote using a touch-tone telephone. The IVR voting system has several advantages including ubiquity of access, accuracy, and accessibility. We developed and tested three iterations of IVR voting systems and examined the usability of each system to determine the merit of an IVR voting system as a voting platform. The usability of the IVR voting systems were compared with traditional voting methods to understand how they performed in relation to these other voting methods. The results showed that the vote-by-phone method was as accurate and as subjectively usable, but not as efficient, as traditional voting methods. These results suggest that an IVR voting system could be viable candidate as a voting platform.