Being a tax and spend liberal, I want to spend the least amount of money
to get a very reliable voting system. Any new system must be at least as
easy as the current system for all voters to use and to count the votes
in a better way.
Any new system should overcome many of the problems with the current
systems. A simple change to the optical scan ballots used in Orange
county would be to require a vote for each election. To allow for a vote
in each election the ballot must have a “I choose not to vote for any
candidate in this race” option. For races where the voter can vote for
multiple candidates the ballot must allow for multiple “I choose not to
vote” options. Having ballots for each precinct available at each county
polling place would help voter turn out. Provisional ballots have at
least two advantages. First if a voter has been removed from the voter
registration rolls by mistake (think Florida 2000) their vote could
still be registered. Second, poll workers could be more aggressive,
because a voter would never be denied a provisional ballot. The system
must offer a human readable, voter verifiable long lasting final ballot.
Touch screen systems can help make sure voters fill out a ballot in a
logical way, by checking that each race is filled out with the correct
number of selections. The computer can be programmed with a wide range
of language options. The font size can be enlarged for the vision
impaired. Images can be used for the illiterate. For the blind the
systems can be used with head phones and a simple large braille keypad.
After the voter has filled out the ballot the system should print the
ballot in human readable form and record the votes electronically. The
printed ballot should be in English and what ever language the voter
selected. All candidate's names should be on the printed ballot, with
the selected candidate marked in some easy to scan visible way. The
electronically recorded votes should be recorded in a redundant and long
lasting way. I would use two CD burners with UDF software. The printed
paper ballot would go to a scanner to be recorded. At the end of the day
the CDs are read by a different computer at the precinct and totaled.
The optical scan counts are then totaled by hand and checked with the
electronic counts. If the totals match, great. If the totals do not
match, then a hand count of the paper ballots should be conducted. The
poll workers should be allowed to make copy of the CDs for the observers
and the press. The systems should not have any networking hardware. The
systems must also be hard to damage. Booting from CF cards allow for
dropping systems, and for sealed systems.
Just a few suggestions. If somebody wants to do a FOSS voting system,
count me in for some programming time.
-Charles Fischer
--
TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/
TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
