Minimum Requirements

[billroper]

Much like daisy_knotwise (but slightly earlier in the day), I headed over to our local polling place to vote against the incumbent Cook County Board President (and to vote for Siobhan Murphy for judge as long as I was there :) ). They asked if I wanted to use the touch-screen voting system and I said, "Sure!"

It was reasonably easy to use, did not tell anyone else that I'd deliberately undervoted by skipping at least one race where I had no opinion whatsoever, and generated a paper copy of my ballot which it displayed to me and sealed away on a spool in its innards. I can see where some people might have had a problem reading the paper copy of the ballot -- the lighting was less than perfect -- but other than that, this system seems to meet the minimum requirements for an electronic voting system.

Comments

[bedlamhouse]

So the system keeps the paper copy? Does it mark it as a final copy somehow if you make changes after it is displayed?

I very, very much like this idea - I'm too familiar with computers to trust them, and the paper copy seems the best way to have an independant validation.

[billroper]

The system keeps the paper copy. I'm guessing, but am not sure, that it will add a couple of lines indicating that this was the submitted ballot or a rejected draft depending on which is the case.

I agree with you -- when all else fails, there's nothing like paper for verifying that no electronic cheating is going on.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a properly designed machine. The machines that have generated protests have, in every case I've encountered, been those that omit the paper trail.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard what the voting systems experts say on the subject, but I would personally feel more comfortable if the electronic machine actually presented the voter with a piece of paper which he could verify while holding it in his hands and then put in a ballot box. Keeping the paper inside the machine seems less than ideal to me, though it's certainly a tremendous improvement on not having paper at all.

voting machine

[birder2.livejournal.com]

I liked our new optical scan machines. You got handed a paper ballot, which you marked (like any electronically scored exam, filling in circles), then fed the ballot to the machine, which would take it in any orientation and read if you had marked things. If you failed to mark a race it asks if you really want to leave it blank; if so, that's your privelege. I suspect if our county clerk had tried to foist off machines that did NOT have a paper trail, he would have been torn limb from limb.