Here, in my town a couple hours drive away from Sillicon Valley, we use a startlingly high-tech voting method…
We fill in the mark next to the candidate or issue we’re voting for with a No.2 pencil. Like a scantron.
I may be in the same county as you. I know someone at work on one of the committees, who I trust implicitly. I think we dumped touch screens not because of what happened, but because of what might happen. Thinking ahead is so rare in politics that it should be encouraged.
He’s a WWII veteran.
Wisconsin’s another one of those “fill in a paper form and scan it” states. We complete the big arrow pointing to the candidate or option we choose, then stick it in some kind of scanning machine. Seems to work pretty well, no complaints here.
As an aside, here’s how much work I had to put into voting this year: (Voted absentee from Canada and started the process much later than I should have)
- Faxed absentee voter forms to county clerk.
- Mailed copies of same forms to county clerk.
- Receive phone call from mother about NEW forms to fill out.
- Got mother to pick up forms from clerk, scan them, and email them to me.
- Faxed THOSE forms to county clerk.
- Took and emailed photo of WI driver’s license, as it doesn’t fax well.
- Received absentee ballot.
- Ran around trying to find another US citizen to witness it, as per WI requirements.
- Voted.
- Spent $10 on Xpresspost so it’ll get there in time.
I still haven’t gotten confirmation from the clerk, but it’ll probably be there on Monday.
Were you in a city of a reasonable size? If your local area has a US Consulate, I’m pretty sure they’d be able to witness that kind of thing.
We’re using those in my precinct too, along with the Diebold AccuVote machine. I’m not sure if it’s statewide.
I was volunteered to be on the Election Board, and we were trained on the machines this week. With the OCS scanner, the machine counts each ballot and prints a report when the polls close, and we also hand count them.
But there’s nothing like that for the Diebold. We plug the unit into a phone jack and download to the election office in the county courthouse.
The county auditor is supposed to be able to verify by tallying the OCS and Diebold numbers against the register where voters sign in, so no votes are “lost”. But what if they are?
The Diebold AccuVote is easy to use and it has features that tell you if you’re doing something wrong before you cast your vote, but the lack of backup bothers me.
Sharon (the clerk) called mom today. It arrived.
Except that I failed the SAT. (ETS owes me big time.)
I prefer the AccuVote. Better yet, the InkaJet. Or even better, the Vote ‘n’ Go. Especially the “Go” part. (Fifty things to vote on, and 30% of them judges I don’t know the first thing about?)
Oh yes, I’m in the same city as this big ugly thing. But they’re closed on Wednesdays, weekends, and holidays, and only open 8-11 even on the days they ARE open. Since I got the ballot on a Monday evening and have classes all morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was just easier to find a US citizen elsewhere.
I assure you, where I live we vote for mayor and other city officials in April or something. Nobody, and I mean nobody, votes then. This year we actually had a real fight for mayor and turnout was still absolutely abysmal. Trust me, the only reason anybody was voting for comptroller or whosis or whatsis today was because of the governor’s race (and we have a gay marriage amendment on the ballot). Oh, and the lieutenant governor, because he’s kind of a famous asshole these days.
The problem is that the cards have a rectangular, partially punched, target. This is supposed to be punched out by a round tool. The card is installed in a holder which has guide bushings for the tool, and also has pages that explain the purpose of each hole. The holes are rectangular, because there is some slop in the alignment between the holder and the card.
If the pin of the tool hits the center of the rectangular punch out zone, then it is probably pushed clear. If it hits only one end, though, that end may tear free, while the other end just hinges…that is hanging chad. The tool IS pushed all the way down.
Keep in mind, that due to the design of the holder, the voter CAN’T tell that this happened, nor can the voter controll how well the pin is centered on the punch zone.
The supplied tool is slightly larger than a push pin. Not the easiest thing for arthritic hands to manipulate.
Now there were other problems beyond “hanging chad” with the 2000 FL ballots, and I realize that you may well be using the term generically, but hanging chad as a specific problem is systemic with this type of balloting system, and NOT an issue of voter competence or performance.
We do have purely local elections, often in the spring. I voted in one once, because voting booth receipts were supposedly a good thing to have for proving state residency for the university where I was going to grad school. The turnout would be truly abysmal for those elections if they were decoupled from the national elections.
I grew up in Maryland, where they had voting booths with levers. Mom took me into the booth with her to vote for Reagan in '84. I voted in a similar booth in the '96 election. Now, I vote with a magic marker and a scantron sheet. I liked the booths with the levers much better. You could change your mind after you’d pulled a lever (but before you had opened the curtain), and it was just more fun than the scantron sheets.