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Re: Hart InterCivic presentation materials up

Paul Walmsley wrote:

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 :-(

Yeah, this would be bad. You can't tally votes with this pile of trash and they are counting on you not wanting to by making it difficult.
Actually, I don't think that Hart is intentionally being obtuse, they just haven't realized that the world is changing and they can't control it.


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

Unless Avante changed their printer this would be incorrect. The Avante printer / ballot box combination that I saw and played with was a dot matrix impact printer.
I have seen a lot of thermal printers from all of the vendors, except Avante. They had an inkjet and a dot matrix.
However, the paper for the dot matrix is still on a roll. I'd love to see what they look like when taken out of the ballot box.




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.

Both Al and I had separately come to pretty much the same conculsion ... the answer is B.
It would work like this:
Voter uses DRE to vote. It does all the things that DREs do (screen over and under voting, etc).
The voter presses the submit ballot button and a ballot gets printed from an inkjet (or laser) printer.
The voter takes the ballot from the printer and sticks it into a sheet feed scanner. This is connected to a computer that tells them who they voted for (voter verifiable). It does not get tallied at the precinct.
The voter sticks this ballot into the ballot box.
Back at the clerk's office, the ballot is scanned again and that is where it gets tallied.

When Avante was in Boulder the first time, the showed their absentee ballot setup and this is exactly what their hardware/software was integrated to do. They just didn't think about having a setup like this in every precinct polling place.

This is the scenario that I will push for. Since each precinct will need a DRE and the Avante DRE is a stand-alone computer (anyone's would do). All you need is a printer and a sheet scanner.

This solution is far less expensive than all DREs. It also lets the county wait and see for these technologies and laws to change for the better or worse without blowing a wad of cash now.


Paul Tiger