Worries persist over electronic voting

Skeptics say election officials who embrace e-voting are trading hanging chads for a new set of problems.

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[bigduke]

Touch screens voting

There are many problems with "touchy feeley" machines for voting! First as mentioned a lack of paper trail. Mechanical machines of another era even had a paper trail! A large roll of paper wound past marking stylus that put a hole for each key depressed and advanced one index at a time until the machine was closed. It was then sealed and the judges signed the seal. I know. I was one years ago.

Then we got many versions of punch cards. Some were good some were terrible. My county fortunatly used good ones. Palm Beach, FL used lousy ones. And there were intermediate flavors.

Next came optical scanned paper ballots. This worked well where they were used. Time to process and count a ballot is under ten seconds. If and only if the ballot was correctly marked it was counted and the paper deposited in the ballot box.

First advantage is that it detected over votes or under votes. Second it detects stray marks.

Bad ballots are rejected and returned to voter for either correction or more likely to start over with a new empty ballot. Mis-marked are distroyed.

I was in a county in Florida visiting for both November 2000 and 2002. The used and still use scanners. One per voting place. A complete paper trail. Faster than any other method with correction for most errors so that they can be corrected. Best of both worlds. Smart reader makes empty ballots and over votes a thing of the past.

Contrast that with a touch screen. Five minutes per voter gives a through put of around 150 per machine in a typical day of 12-13 hours open. This means that a county with 150,000 voters would need at least a thousand machines at $4K each. Assume same county with scanners. With 150 poling places which is a reasonable estimate this would require but 150 machines that cost the same as the screen machines. Fifteen percent of cost with fewer chances of errors, and most important a paper trail.

In case of power failure, voting could still take place and the votes counted later. Try that with a touch screen.

I rest my case.