4 ms·
Texan here. The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan re
by sjm-lbm 8y ago
Texan here.
The funny thing is that, when we go to a polling place on election day, we will almost always get a paper ballot to be used with an optical scan reader. This system actually hits me as an ideal: the electronic reader can be simpler and fairly decoupled from other systems, and each voter will leave a paper trail that should clearly indicate their intent. Admittedly, the electronic readers we use are probabally insecure and awful, but the concept hits me as fairly reasonable.
In this case, we are in the early voting period, and there are a reduced number of polling places - and each polling place can be used by any voter in that county, which means that voters might be (and probabally are) voting on slightly different races and using slightly different ballots. These machines remove the need for the early polling places to have a lot of valid paper ballots on hand while still allowing each voter to see and vote in all races they would be able to vote in on election day.
It's actually a fairly good use of voting machines, even if it would be nice if the machines were something other than terrible.
- wlll 8y agoThere's a good video on why any computerised or electronic elements in the voting process are a bad idea here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
- ghettoimp 8y agoAnother Texan here. That has not been my experience. I've lived and voted in Austin for 15 years and have never seen a single paper ballot. Our voting machines are, and have been, simple screens with a scrolly-wheel interface. They produce no paper record for you to review or deposit anywhere. This would, to me, seem to be a minimum requirement for anyone to have any belief that their vote has been counted correctly.
- warmwaffles 8y agoThere is a paper record. Watch the people running the ballots next time. Your session there was recorded but your vote is not directly tied to you as that would be illegal.
- ghettoimp 8y agoIf the voter doesn't get to see the paper record, what evidence is there that the paper says what they wanted?
- adrianmonk 8y agoPaper trail is coming. I don't think it's time for this election cycle, but presumably for the next one. http://www.kut.org/post/travis-county-voters-are-getting-voting-machines-paper-trail http://www.kut.org/post/travis-county-voters-are-getting-vot...
- karmajunkie 8y agoExactly ditto for me.
- yongjik 8y agoI'm a South Korean national living in the Silicon Valley area. I've participated in South Korean election several times, including one (or two?) congressional election. Luckily for me, they open a voting booth in San Jose so that every Korean citizen in the area can come and vote. When I arrive, they ask for my ID (i.e., passport), look up my registered address, and the computer automatically prints out the correct set of ballots, and an envelope with the correct return address. I take them to the voting booth, stamp on the candidates I like, put the ballots into the envelope, seal the envelope, and put it in a box, and later all the envelopes in the box will be sorted and sent to the correct district so that they can be counted at the actual election day. It's 2018, folks. This isn't magic.
- eseehausen 8y agoMaking things hard to vote is a feature, not a bug.
- masonic 8y agothey ask for my ID Fine for Korean elections; illegal for domestic elections here.
- kilotaras 8y agoSK most likely has a national ID that is automatically received by all citizen (same as overwhelming majority of rest of the world). US doesn't.