Don’t belittle your vote.

Electronic voting is an important issue in this country. This project is a comment on some of the possible downfalls of the technology. It displays imagery of politics interspersed with war, to portray the importance of our decisions when it comes time to vote. There is a section of the screen showing lie detector rolls (probably for earthquakes, actually), this section gets colored progressively more and more depending on how high each of the votes goes. A large number of people feel that the truth can be colored by who is in power, and this is my nod to that idea.

The first showing of the project was 2005.03.26 at a “Bring Your Own Art” show located at the old Sandpoint naval base in Seattle, anti-curated by SOAP.

The basis of this iteration of the project was an industrial 27″ television turned on it’s side (literally). On top was a box with three buttons. Inside of the display was a laptop and circuitry for the buttons. The circuitry for the buttons was simply the circuit and cabling from an old USB keyboard, hacked apart and three buttons wired up instead of a matrix for a normal keyboard.
The software utilized was Isadora, by Troikatronix

From watching the actions of the guests and contributors at the event, I have come up with some changes to the display of the buttons and the onscreen imagery. This will most likely go up in a somewhat different framing in a Capitol Hill bar in a little while. A large percentage of viewers assumed that the imagery displayed was a video loop and so did not attempt to interact with the installation. A large percentage of people who understood that it was interactive expected something to happen right away when they voted, which wasn’t the case when I set the machine up. Part of the way through the night, I changed the setup to allow for more interaction. I still consider this to be a work in progress.

Related Links:
Electronic Voting Page
Verified Voting
Rebecca Mercuri, Ph.D.’s Electronic Voting papers and articles
Black Box Voting
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s E-voting page

Unrelated Links:
All this talk about “black boxes” made me think of the band Black Box Recorder