Electronic Voting Machine Use Case

(Strange, I thought I published this. I guess I must of hit the 'Save as Draft' button instead. Oh well. Better late than never I guess - 2006/12/04)

Electronic voting machines problems have been all over the news. I don't understand why there are so many problems. Is it that hard to program an electronic voting machine?

A basic Use Case would look something like this:

Use Case Name: Entering vote
Use Case Id: U1001
Actors: Voter, System, printer
Description: Voter selects candidate and is recorded.
Precondition: Voter logs into system
Postcondition: Vote is recorded.
Flow of Events:
- Voters selects the candidate they want to vote for.
- System asks to confirm.
- Voter confirms selection.
- System records the vote to memory card.
- System prints to printer.
- System returns a status message back to the user to show that their vote was recorded or there was an internal error.

Error Conditions:
- Voter selected incorrect candidate, return to selection screen Goto U1001
- System can't write to memory card. Goto E1001.
- System can't print to printer. Goto E1002.


Pretty straight forward Use Case.

So why are voting machine manufacturing companies having so many problems?

Here is a perfect example of things going wrong.

Zero Vote Tally Off - by 1

Trick or Treat

Trick or Treat,
Smell my feet,
Give me something good to eat,
If you don't, I don't care,
I'll pull down your underwear!


Do kids even get dressed up anymore for Halloween? I was home yesterday giving out the candy to the local neighborhood kids and I really didn't see any kid that was dressed up. A lot of them were just in sweats, and not even with masks on. There was one girl that was in her cheerleader outfit. It had the local middle school writing on the front. that was suppose to be a costume? WTF? I guess dressing up isn't that popular anymore.

Additionally, I was just shocked at how few people came by trick-or-treating. I have so much extra candy left, that I should have been giving each kid one huge-hand full of candy instead of 4 pieces I was doing. In the morning, I usually quite a few kids on each corners waiting for the bus to come pick them up. I think maybe 20 kids came by, no older than 13 I think. Back in the day, we use to get even college students stopping by the house tricker-treating. (BTW, one year during college, I went tricker-treating in the dorms -- boy did I get some interesting stuff).

Free candy anybody?