Electronic voting

[chrishansenhome]

In this US Presidential election year, voting and voting mechanisms will come under great scrutiny. Electronic voting is all the rage; however, computer professionals (of which I am one) often mistrust the safety, security, and accuracy of the electronic voting process. This article in the New York Times magazine is must-reading for people who are going to be voting this year.

I just posted my primary ballot for California this morning (I voted for Hilary) and it is to be counted by optical scanning. No touch screens for me.

Comments

[jwg.livejournal.com]

Good article. One problem with the scanning machine system is that if people mark their ballots sloppily their vote may be miscounted. In a Cambridge school committee election several years ago that was very close there was a manual recount. The results were the same with slightly different numbers. I watched some of the recount and there were some interesting ballot markings. In a couple of cases people had drawn a circle around the oval so that the scanner (these scanners only have read heads in the "correct" places) didn't see the vote. When manually recounted these ballots were interpreted by humans to match the voter intent. Better scanners that notice markings out side of the ovals would help since they could either reject the ballot of dump it in a bin for manual checking later.

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

I would rather have the computer be very specific, and then let people look at the disputed ballots. The capacity for voters to be cussed is probably almost infinite, but the capacity of programmers, architects, and business analysts to anticipate how cussed people can be is very very finite.

I do agree that the future is probably with manually marked and optically counted ballots.