“But we’re talking humans and machines. You know it’s not going to be perfect.”
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..Alan;what ((personal resposibility)) should the voting public have in ensuring their vote was cast and cast the way they intended..

Posted by: Rob_NC at July 12, 2004 09:04 AM

This is likely much ado about nothing.

In this computer age we should be better able to create a simple and reliable system. We use machine like these when we take money out of an ATM, check out at the Grocery, buy movie tickets, etc. To suggest that people can not adapt is ridiculous.

However it is possible that by trying to save a buck, or due to computer illiteratacy, the Secretary is to blame. There is no way that spending a few more dollars with Microsoft, Apple, Dell, or the guys who make all those ATMs, this problem could not be licked.

I expect the Florida election will be the most accurate ever, but the press will highlight the morons who use checks to buy a candy bar.

Posted by: Agrippa at July 12, 2004 02:51 PM

It seems like everyone leaping to make new voting machines took the same path to making it better _for_then_ without making it better for the user. “Hey, if we make it completely paperless, we won’t have to print or scan.”

If the touchscreen part wasn’t a ‘voting machine’ but instead a ‘ballot preparation machine’, I think all the main goals would be satisfied:

The touchscreen part can use lots of real estate to spell things out for people, and, at the end, produce a ‘ballot’ that is unlike normal ballots - it doesn’t have anyone you didn’t vote for on it. A nice neat dynamically produced list like:
President: Some B. Ody
Senator: John Doe.

But you haven’t voted yet - you’ve just got a 100% (ok, ok, say 99.998%) machine readable ballot.

Then you can go through the poll-place-workers and go to the actual voting machine to stuff it in.

1) There’s no printout kept by the voter - so ‘vote buying’ would work as well as it does now.
2) There’s a physical paper to recount.
3) A computer generated the form, and a computer accepted the form - we’d better be able to make that amazingly reliable.
4) No ambiguity: Yes, I really did mean to not vote for president while voting Mickey Mouse into the Senate.
5) If the votes ever needed to be forensically examine to check who voted - they could. This couldn’t be done cavalierly, but if one counties’ poll operators were to be prosecuted for burning ballots or otherwise hosing things up intentionally - there’d be enough fingerprints on the sealed votes to backtrack people that voted/people that were screwed or whatever. Anything larger than a county would be nuts though.
6) It should allay a lot of fears about votes counting. The ‘ballot machine’ can print as many reprints/alterations as necessary - but the ‘actual voting box’ should have a big number on front: ‘Votes inside: XXX’. Normally, you stuff your ballot in - it gets scanned and accepted/rejected. Accepted -> counter increments. Rejected -> the ballot physically is spit out stamped ‘Illegible, please fill out a NEW ballot’.

Given all that, it should be perfectly clear that the voting box is color/religion/sexual-orientation blind. The poll place workers can still be snots,

Posted by: Alan Blue at July 12, 2004 05:21 PM

If a person cannot read, why should they be allowed to vote?

Posted by: leaddog2 at July 12, 2004 11:55 PM