RE: Hart InterCivic presentation materials up

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Paul Tiger wrote:

> The thing that both Al and Kell have been making me see so clearly is the
> need for the voter verifiable ballot. Maybe you'd be shocked to know that I
> think that voters should be able to keep a copy of their ballots? Yeah, I
> can't see what all the secrecy is about. Its my vote and I should be able to
> tell anyone that I want to.

seems like it's worth distinguishing between paper receipts and paper
ballots.  the difference (to my mind) being that you can take paper
receipts home with you, they are not available for counting; whereas paper
ballots are deposited at the precinct and are used either (A) as the
official record of your vote, or (B) as a backup record of your vote, for
recounts and for voting machine validation tests.

I don't think that paper receipts are very useful; they also facilitate
vote-buying, as one of the vendor representatives pointed out.  On the
other hand, the generation of voter-verifiable paper ballots makes sense,
since it works around many verifiability problems which seem inherent to
DRE machines.

> Can anyone here tell me if Hart was able to demonstrate a method to use
> their DREs to produce a paper ballot?

Hart showed two devices that generated paper ballots. 

The first device was familiar: a voting terminal (the "eSlate") with an
thermal printer attached.  This device generated a plain-text confirmation
of your vote, which would scroll onto an enclosed takeup reel once the
vote was confirmed.  I do not recall whether this printout incorporated a
2-D bar code or not.  Hart actually demonstrated this device in operation.

The second device shown was a standalone thermal printer in a voting
booth-style privacy shield.  Next to it sat a laptop computer with a
barcode scanner attached.  Voters who wish to confirm their votes on paper
would proceed to this device after voting on an eSlate.  The standalone
printer would generate a 2-D bar code -- without printing plaintext --
which could be scanned by the bar code reader to confirm the voter's
intent.  If the voter accepted the ballot, they could press the "Accept"
button on top of the printer, which would then scroll the barcode onto the
enclosed takeup reel.  Otherwise, they could press the "Reject" button, at
which point the barcode would be annotated with some sort of rejection
code and scrolled onto the takeup reel.  The voter would then return to
the election judge to vote again.  Hart did not demonstrate this device in
operation - it was an 'engineering prototype.'



- Paul