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.'"

Comments

ink

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:ink

[Gadget_Guy]

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

I don't know how they cope in offices around the world without a geek on hand to change their printer toners. If even my 70 year old mother can fix paper jams in complicated photocopiers then it shouldn't be too hard to find people to keep the machines running.

The geeks aren't supposed to be changing toners, they should be making printers that are easy enough for the common pleb to change without assistance. If this can't be done then the geeks have failed.

Re:ink

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:ink

[Xaositecte]

There's a reason geeks haven't made easy-to-use tech to fill every niche yet.

Job Security.

For your added convenience

[antifoidulus]

They will be pre-filled in for the Republican candidate. To save you the time of thinking that your vote will actually be counted towards the candidate you intend to vote for.

Re:For your added convenience

[LaughingCoder]

... and if you are in the military, they will be printed with disappearing ink.

What's wrong with paper

[Ckwop]

I like this move. With all the diebold problems and election computers found to be wanting, nobody has really addressed the question: "What is wrong with paper in the first place?"

Sure, it's slow to count but not overly so. While US ballots are more complicated than UK ballots they still take just over a day to count. If you can't wait that long, you're just impatient.

If you want a quick answer, just use exit polls. Until Bush's election fraud, these were a reliable way of having an idea of who has won the election.

We already have a well evolved security procedure for handling paper ballots. Why are people so quick to throw that away a proven solution and to try a totally closed computer system off a random vendor to solve a problem that never really existed anyway? I'll leave the answer is an exercise to the reader.

Simon

Re:What's wrong with paper

[oliderid]

"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.

Money-making opportunity

[Thunderstruck]

This is a really great idea. I really, really great idea. This is the kind of "duh" stuff that all of our modern technology is supposed to help fix.

You know what would be an even better idea? Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. This would help prevent counterfeit ballots. Of course, since you can't let these machines break down, the cartidges would probably have to have an internal sensor that shuts down the printer when the ink level gets low. Maybe, just to be safe, they would have to kick in when about 60% of the ink is gone. We need to protect the voters, after all. ...and really, how many tax-payers pay attention to the money their government spends on ink?

Re:Money-making opportunity

[LaughingCoder]

Make these ballot printers with a special, proprietary ink cartridge. ... This would help prevent counterfeit ballots.

A better way than special ink would be to have the blank ballots watermarked.

Re:Money-making opportunity

[Minwee]

I think you're missing the point.

There are already several companies making $8000 / gallon specialty ink distributed in highly secure cartridges tied to specific printers and designed to self-destruct before they have used 50% of their contents.

You don't need a government contract to buy them. All you need to do is go to Staples.

Re:Threat model

[lachlan76]

Call in a mathematician and get them to figure out how many ballots should be needed to keep costs to a minimum, assuming you leave open the option of printing more ballots, in case the 5/1/0.01% probability comes back to bite you---whether printing it off with a printer on-site, or keeping a large-scale printer on standby in the event that it looks like you are to run out.

The maths isn't exactly difficult---with sufficient historical data, one learns all that's necessary in high school, at least down my way.

That said, we have compulsory voting down our way (Australia), so it's not really an issue that comes up. For that matter, does the risk of printing ~600 sheets of paper too many matter that much? It shouldn't be a problem.

Cryptographic verification

[sakdoctor]

I don't get. We have had, in theory, the protocols to make cryptographically secure verifiable & anonymous e-voting for years now, and yet it hasn't been implemented.

A bunch of hungover CS undergrads with 24 hours till their deadline, would come up with a better e-voting implementation than the hopelessly naive excuses spewed up by diebold et al.

Re:Cryptographic verification

[cfortin]

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.