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The US is not homogenous in the technology used to vote - running elections is left to the states, and different states use different polling technologies. The
by jffry 5y ago
The US is not homogenous in the technology used to vote - running elections is left to the states, and different states use different polling technologies.
The systems we have for voting in Washington DC seem to be a best-of-both-worlds approach. There are touchscreen kiosks that you use to make your choices, then the kiosk prints out a properly marked paper ballot that it asks you to verify. Then you take your ballot over to the normal scanning machines. You can also request an unmarked ballot and fill it by hand if you prefer.
The kiosks can provide a wide range of assistive tech (larger fonts, instructions in a variety of languages, and headphone jack for audio prompts). They also help ensure you do not miss a question - you must explicitly choose "skip" - and they help ensure you select between 0 and N choices in choose-N questions. Also they print a clearly-marked ballot which helps avoid ambiguities like if somebody partially fills a circle by hand.
And best of all, the end product is still a physical, auditable piece of paper.
- pmoriarty 5y agoThis is all pretty meaningless if the vote counting is still done by machine. The US should go back to hand-counted pen and paper voting.
- meatmanek 5y agoIf you suspect a problem with the vote-counting machines, you can audit the paper votes with pen and paper. But in the cases where there isn't much reason to doubt the outcome of the election, you can save the cost of all that labor by letting a machine do something machines do really well.
- Teever 5y agoI highly doubt the assertion that spending money on buying and maintaining voting machines will ever exceed the cost savings from not paying people to count paper ballots.