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Florida to Scrap Touch Screen Voting?
AlHunt writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is calling on the Florida Legislature to spend $30M to replace the troublesome touch screen voting machines with an optical scan system that allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate's name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader."
Canada's last federal election used machine-read paper. A sheed of paper with circles you mark an X in. They are put in an envelope you can't see through, then given to the election official who feeds the paper into a reader. You get a green light if the machine was able to read your vote, at which point the paper is sucked into the lock box in case a manual recount is needed. If it didn't read it, it is spat back out and you are given the option of destroying the ballot and getting a new one.
A certain number of polling stations in each area randomly have their machines opened and their electronic count matched against a manual count. If they are off by one, the entire district is manually counted.
All in all, this is the best voting system I have ever seen. Quietly implemented, without a fuss. Designed by people who are more interested in an accurate, quick, efficient system than they are interested in partisan politics or winning contracts for their favourite corporation.
I love living here.
What the Governor wants is exactly what we do here in New Hampshire.
The tallying is instantaneous, the technology is proven (scantron tests in every school in the country) and the paper trail is there.
If they ever want voting in Florida to cease being a national joke this is the way to do it.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
We do a very similar thing here in New Hampshire except you put the sheet in the scanner yourself and the election officials are nearby.
Eliminating the election official's handling of a marked ballot reduces the opportunity they have to mess with it. No sleight of hand tricks are even remotely possible.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I don't understand why authorities in the US insist on using voting machines. From my experience, I worked several times as NGO election observer on voting sites in my country (Croatia), and we had no problem with getting all the paper ballots and counting them. On practically every voting site in the country, there were (beside government appointed members) one representative from each political party and one or more NGO observers. Each of us had the chance to review the site and ballot boxes prior to voting, see them sealed, be present during opening of the boxes and counting and recount them himself. Also, each of us had to sign the final report and any observed irregularities.
I can assure that voting (at least on our site) was fair, since at the table were basically 7 people, and no two people there trusted each other:)
With all that, we managed to count all 1000 ballots for our site within 2-3 hours, and all the ballots were counted at least three times. Such system, in country of 4 million people enables us to get 90% of the sites processed by midnight of the voting day. Further, all the ballots are kept for one year, available for anyone's request for recount. I don't believe it's much different in any European country.