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Why Does a Voting Machine Need Calibration?
New submitter Shotgun writes "I heard on the radio that there were some issues with voting machines in Greensboro, NC (my hometown), and the story said the machines just needed "recalibration". Which made me ask, "WTF? Why does a machine for choosing between one of a few choices need 'calibration'?" This story seems to explain the issue."
Why are we using touch screens at all in something so important as an election?
ATMs have been using buttons down the side of the screen for decades - why aren't voting machines built the same way?
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Whatever happened to all those video games that used to be in the arcades back in the 1980s? They had this amazing technology called a button. It never needed to be calibrated, and it lasted for years under incredible abuse. I swear, these election machine manufacturers seem like idiots.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
Los Angeles County uses Inkavote. Basically it's just a little rubber stamp you press into the circle on the ballot. The machines themselves have guides to keep you from putting the stamp anywhere but an oval. You insert the ballot, ink in the correct circles, then remove the ballot and turn it in. There are no moving parts except for the small spring-loading in the stamper and the hinges holding the pages in the machine -- which are themselves identical to the ones in your sample ballot as mailed to you. This means you can mark your sample ballot at home, hold it up alongside the corresponding page in the machine, and simply copy your bubbles from your sample ballot onto the real one.
This has all the advantages I can think of -- it's almost non-mechanical and CAN be done by hand if there are insufficient machines available, it generates human-readable paper ballots, it's faster than a touchscreen system while also being far less complex, and it's easy to understand. There are many things I can gripe about, living in the Los Angeles area. The voting machines are definitely NOT one of them.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.