My G+ Profile
« Inside Utah: Talking About UTOPIA | Main | Prison Lawnmowers »
Electronic Voting and Paper Ballots
This story from the Salt Lake Tribune talks about the policy confision and questions surrounding recounts for electronic voting machines in Utah after last month’s primary election. While there is some chaos right now, I’m confident that it’s going to all get worked out because the proper levers are in place.
Utah’s law requires a paper ballot and designates it the “official” ballot. Based on that law, there will be some court challenges and lawsuits and precedent will be established. That’s how these sorts of things get worked out.
Some will decry this as messy and expensive, but that’s the way democracy works most of the time.
Posted by windley on July 8, 2006 4:04 PM
Comment from Christie at July 11, 2006 4:57 PM
So far, so good.
Insist that all voting at the polls is done using paper ballots and counted using optical scanners. This is the most reliable, user friendly and cost-effective voting technology available today.
Increase oversight and accuracy by insisting that scanners run on open source code that is owned by the state not private companies. The code for these machines is simply to write and replacing the code on optical scanner machines with publicly owned software would save the state millions of dollars.
Conduct random audits of paper ballots vs. machine tallies at the precinct level. Audits should be conducted by pulling machines at random and comparing hand counts of the paper ballots "produced by those machines" with the electronic tally of those machines. This is the only way to ensure the machines are working properly.
Leave a comment
I encourage you to leave a comment below. Your email address will not be displayed on Technometria, but allows me to communicate with you directly. Your email address won't be displayed, but will be used to compute a MicroID for your comment.