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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.'"
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.
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.
Monstar L
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.
...and really, how many tax-payers pay attention to the money their government spends on ink?
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.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
"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.
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.