Voting mechanics

[magid]

OK, so I've only ever voted in MA, and both municipalities I've voted in use paper ballots. Not anything tricky to understand, just basically scantron things: fill in the bubbles and you're done. Just like all those standardized tests everyone has to take these days, so the voters are prepared, as it were. The thought even of using a lever sort of machine makes me nervous, and computers doubly so, since they're theoretically hackable in even more ways. And there's no paper trail.

Please, someone explain why there isn't more standardization in how ballots are made and processed? OK, and why we don't all use a scantron sort of ballot, since it leaves a paper trail, and isn't tricky to use at all.


Nothing about whether the car-repair guys were involved in the election in this post. Or, there wasn't.

Comments

[jwg.livejournal.com]

There is a form of standardization in the sense that there arevery few companies that make voting equipment and each state has some sort of certification process that OKs the equipment. As a result of the florida fiasco in 2000 congress created the Help America Vote Act that among other things provided a lot of funds for voting equipment as well as establishing standards (which some of the new equipment doesn't meet).

A few years ago, I was a member of a committee advising the Cambridge Election Commission in the conversion from handwritten paper ballots to an automated version for the Cambridge PR election system which is very complex where the count used to take a week. At the time Cambridge used punched cards for other elections and had a problem in that card reading was done at Harvard and they were about to decommission their card readers so something had to be done soon. At that time some places (e.g. boston) were using the old lever machines, some were using punched cards and some were using Accuvote (now Diebold) scanning machines. There were some new touch screen systems available but they were not certified by the Secy of State of Mass so choosing them would be risky from the point of getting approval. So when you came down to it we had no choice but to go with scanners. Accuvote modified the firmware to deal with the PR ballots, and there was a PC based PR distribution system available via The Center for Voting and Democracy (http://www.fairvote.org) that could be used for the vote distribution. The Secy of state allowed this variation on the standard system to be used for one election prior to approving it.

The touch screen systems could have a better interface to protect against undervotes and overvotes and can be tied into a registration system as well. They'd be a lot better for the PR system since it could display the ordered choices before the vote was officialized. Voting machines are an interesting form of capital expenditure. You have to buy a lot of them to meet the needs, they get used once or twice a year and have no other use. An advantage of the scanning system is you only need one machine per precinct instead of a bunch of them so they'd be inherently cheaper. This is probably why the voting machine companies are pushing touch screen systems.

[geekosaur]

Much of it is what you're used to. I grew up with the lever machines in Ohio, but by the time I reached voting age they'd gone to punch-card ballots (of the Florida "butterfly" sort, no less, although the actual "butterfly" situation I've never actually seen happen on an Ohio ballot). As a result, neither really scares me... but I'm somehow more trusting of the lever-based machines, which are still in use here in Pennsylvania.

[jaq.livejournal.com]

I find it incredible that voting mechanisms and rules vary so much across the US.

Voting here has been standardised for a long time on drawing crosses with a pencil in boxes on bits of paper. This year's election (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jaq/818774.html) was the first where they've used automated counting machines, but they just scanned the paper so it wasn't much different for voters.