Mario Burgos has an excellent post online about ballots, re: the paper vs. electronic debate. He makes a good case, so I’m just going to quote a good chunk:
Why is it that when it comes to voting there seems to be only two camps? Either those wanting paper ballots or those wanting electronic voting? Why can’t we have both and make everyone happy?
Think about it?
An electronic ATM style touch screen voting machine that prints out a paper ballot that then can be visually verified by the voter before being fed into a paper scanning machine for a redundant tabulation. This way everyone is happy.
- Joe/Jane Voter knows that the machine registered his/her vote correctly.
- There is built in redundancy with machines checking machines.
- There is a paper trail in case of doubt.
- Neither partisan volunteers nor partisan clerk employees are trying to determine at 2:00 a.m. in the morning what someone “intended” by the strange illegible mark they put on a paper ballot.
- We are still able to use technology, so that we can have a true count on Election Night.
I think he’s right. Every election, I take my grandmother to vote early. She’s disabled, and needs help casting her ballot. It was much easier with the touchscreen machines, because she could read the names on the display without assistance.
At the same time, I think we need th redundancy of a paper trail. Why not use the best of both worlds?
There’s still some kinks to work out (I think we need open-source platforms for the machines) but, otherwise, the system should work.
(updated to include a link)
barb
This COULD be a good idea IF some things are in place. For instance, unless we have nonproprietary software running the machines there’s no guarantee that the machine is registering the votes as shown on the receipts. Unless neutral observers have a right to check the software, there’s no way to determine whether it’s been fooled with. To my knowledge, there are currently no electronic machines that are nonproprietary that print out receipts, which is why states are switching to paper ballots with electronic scanners. You have a hard record of the votes that can be recounted or audited to compare with scanner totals.
Michelle Meaders
I was a pollworker at the election last month and got the training. They told us that New Mexico chose the ES&S paper ballot system because of the Automark, which uses a touch-screen machine to mark a paper ballot that is read by an electronic scanner along with the hand-marked ballots. Your Grandmother should have been able to use it for early voting, since we now use the same machines for absentee, early, and election day voting. They told us that the Automark was too slow to use for anyone but voters with disabilities or language problems, but it was bought for them because it can magnifiy the ballot or read it to them. I don’t know if anyone else makes a faster version without the disability options (that is also affordable).