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Florida Election Ballots to be Printed On-Demand
davidwr writes "The St. Petersburg, FL, Times reports that Florida is going back to paper ballots, but with a twist. They are printing the ballots on-demand, right there at the polling booth. This isn't machine-assisted voting where a touch-screen fills in your printed ballot for you. It's just a way to save printing costs and reduce paper waste. 'Without ballot on demand, poll workers at 13 early Hillsborough voting sites would need to stockpile stacks of every possible ballot type. With ballot on demand, poll workers can print out a person's distinct ballot type when he or she arrives to vote.'"
If you can print up your own ballots on any printer, what's to stop you from printing up extra ballots at home and slipping a few extras in the ballot box. Once they are in there, they would be hard to tell from the authentic ones. I hope they are incorporating some kind of security features into these ballots, and aren't just using standard inkjet printers on standard inkjet paper. The paper ballots we use up here in Canada are printed on special paper, to ensure that people aren't printing up extra ballots. Each printed ballot is accounted for.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Wrong. The printshop I work for prints the federal election ballots and municipal election ballots for the Yukon. 60lb offset and process black ink. The only security feature is that every ballot is numbered twice and those numbers are accounted for by the returning officer. Every ballot in the box must have an accompanying stub that the election workers tear off before you receive the ballot. That's all you need, even for large polling stations.