RE: Hart InterCivic presentation materials up

["Alan Crandall" <ipix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul,

My suggestion is similar but actually removes the DRE from the voting
process entirely (accept for the disabled).  My idea is to have a paper
ballot voting station that when activated provides a printed ballot that the
voter then marks their intentions on, having voted they then press a button
to submit their vote and the optical scan unit which reads and displays
their vote on the screen.  If the screen displays the voters intention
accurately then the voter hits the button that says cast ballot and the
ballot is dropped into the ballot box.  If there are under or over votes the
display will inform the voter at which time the voter has the option to mark
the ballot again or continue and cast the ballot.  I know according to HAVA
we have to have one DRE per polling place so those could be set up to help
people with disabilities so that they are not disenfranchised.  The end
result would be that if a re-count is needed the same ballot that the voter
cast will be recounted by optical scan.  Is this not the way democracy
should function?  Why must we make the huge leap from punch card to DRE?!
This is the only solution that makes sense to me and would be the most
difficult to rig (in my humble opinion).

Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Walmsley [mailto:paul@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, October 23, 2003 10:18 AM
To: paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: bcv@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Hart InterCivic presentation materials up


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