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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."
I mean, we all know that Florida voters have a perfect track record of meaningfully, unambiguously, carefully, and thoughtfully placing a mark next to the right name. Yes, the scanner will kick out the badly marked ones... but I seem to recall they've been down that road before. What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As other people have pointed out, there is a compromise position: you could have electronic consoles to actually enter the vote, but which produce a paper receipt that's then put into a scanner to be counted. That way you get basically all the advantages of e-voting, with the benefits of optical-scan, but without having to have voters actually write anything on the cards. (Because, apparently, as a society we are incapable of writing and following simple instructions anymore. Not that this surprises me.)
Paperless voting was a huge mistake, but touchscreen voting itself wasn't a bad idea. There's no need to get rid of the things from this very expensive experiment that we apparently conducted that worked, just the parts that didn't.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You raise some valid concerns, but lets look at them:
. I am sure you feel qualified to vote on a handful of issues that are close to your heart, but what about the other 99.9% of thing going on?
Do you really hold your fellow countrymn in such low regard?
I agree that no-one is likely to have the right answers for all issues, but isn't that already the case with existing legislators? How often have we heard about bills being barely read before they are voted on, or questioned the knowledge of lawmakers on issues we hold dear - like so many technology oriented pieces of legislation (say, for spam laws)? Even the lawmakers aer not infallible, and I don't think that the public would do that much worse on voting on these issues themselves. Sure, there may be some poor decisions made, but they would be OUR poor decisions, not those thrust upon us by a small group who may have been unduly influenced by lobbyists etc. After a year or so of finding out that actually you can't have free schooling AND no tax, I think pople would start taking a lot more interest in the process, and start making more appropriate decisions.
If a politician tosses out a bill and says 'vote for it and you will get more money' while ignoring the costs, do you really think that enough people will vote against it?
I think that this is not as likely as you would think - for the same reason that we don't automatically vote for a politician that promises say, huge tax cuts or free money for everyone - there are enough voters who know that such promises are unfulfillable or unsustainable, so we don't vote that way.
The founding fathers didn't have everything right to start with - after all, they didnt think women were fit to vote at all (along with the rest of the world) , yet in the intervening time we have decided that mabey women can vote sensibly after all. One of the main resons you need so many intervening steps though, is the imposibility of collecting and counting votes by hand - you HAVE to have proxies when you don't have a means of hearing the voice of the people more often. This should no longer be the obstacle it was though, in this age of communications.
At the very least, even if we can't vote on every bill we should be able to directly show our support/non-support for a bill - electronic lobbying for the masses, if you will.