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Florida Election Ballots to be Printed On-Demand

Posted by Zonk on from the love-the-smell-of-a-fresh-ballot dept.

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.'"

3 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. ink by Turn-X+Alphonse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These machines will jam or run out of ink with no geeks around to fix it.

    Welcome to good ideas which don't stand up to the reality of 5-6 old people monitoring a station.

    --
    I like muppets.
  2. Re:What's wrong with paper by oliderid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"

    Here in Belgium we have electronic vote for more than ten years. I've seen recently a study comparing paper and electronic machine costs.

    I don't remember the figures precisly but it was something like:

    The cost per vote on paper 2 US$
    The cost per electronic vote 5 US$

    I always been extremely suspicious about these electronic voting machine. Especially those running Windows (Desktop PC) with accessible serial ports like those we have here.

    The good news is that the government plans to get rid of it (at least for a part of the country) and go back to the much safer (and cheaper) paper.

  3. Re:Cryptographic verification by cfortin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, no we don't.

    Its the verifiable & anonymous that's hard. Perhaps you have a point if you assume that the machines are working as intended, the programs written correctly, and the code running on the machines is the same that was certified.

    Maintaining formal control over evoting machines, given the number of district and varying forms uses, can't help but cost orders of magnitude more than just using paper votes with an electronic counter, like they do here in RI.

    Diabold shows what happens whenever cost-to-impliment-correctly is significantly more than cost-to-look-like-you-satisfied-the-contract.