RE: Hart InterCivic presentation materials up

[Paul Walmsley <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Paul Tiger wrote:

> There are a number of problems associated with the thermal printers, most

agreed.  

Another problem with the thermal-printed paper trail is that no vendor
showed any means for automatically tabulating them.  Any count or recount
with thermal ballots would be laborious at best.  Imagine counting 100,000
supermarket receipts by hand :-(

[ Avante used thermal printers also, correct?  I don't think any vendor 
showed printers that print onto office paper. ]

> Back on the topic of why not a receipt ... it was the vendors that came up
> with the idea of vote selling. I never heard about it before they started
> using it as an excuse not to provide a voter-verifiable printed ballot.

It seems like one could have voter-verifiable printed ballots without
having paper receipts, though.  We could either A) retain the printed
ballot inside the voting terminal, as Avante's or Hart's systems did; or
B) as others on the list have suggested, use the voting terminal as a
"user interface" to print out an optical-scan paper ballot that would be
deposited in a ballot box and used as the official record of the voter's
intent.


- Paul