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June 06, 2006
Life : Voting Machines
Today was a primary election in California (where members of various political parties choose their candidates), and in addition there were several direct measures on the ballot (mostly tax and bond issues for various causes).
What I found interesting was the new voting machines. California used to use the punch-card ballots which caused so much trouble in Florida in 2000. After that fiasco, the State of California (as well as its constituent counties) had been casting around for the best solution which meets such a diverse set of constraints that when the process started there was no voting system which met all of the legal requirements. Even in the last election, there were counties where the combination of the requirements of the counties and the requirements of the state invalidated all available systems.
The device I got to use today was clearly a compromise in the worst possible sense of that word. It was fundamentally a touch-screen voting machine. You sign in and get an authorization card from the poll workers. The card just ensures that you only vote once and vote only on the questions you are authorized to vote on (so members of a political party can only vote on their own candidates). You stick the card into the voting machine and it displays on a screen the candidates and questions in large print. You touch the screen to mark your vote, with the ability to go back and review and change your votes before committing to them.
After you commit is where things get interesting. The voting machine has bolted onto its side a paper tape printer (like a cash-register printer) encased in clear plastic set up so you can read the last 30cm of the tape. When you commit your vote on the touch screen, it then prints out what you voted for on the paper tape and you have to confirm that what was printed was what you meant to vote. Actually, the ballot was long enough that it comes out as multiple pages so you have to do this multiple times. You can at this point go back and change your vote, causing the cycle to begin again. Once you say "yes" to all pages, it prints out a final page which is a pixel encoded version of the same thing. Because the printer is relatively slow, it at least doubled (if not tripled) the time it took me to vote.
I understand the reason for this. Having a "paper trail" for all votes makes sense (bits are too vulnerable). Likewise, if you do have a paper trail, I can understand wanting to allow the voter to confirm that it matches what they intended. Still, when I actually had to use it, the whole thing seemed rather contrived. One of my co-workers regularly votes by absentee ballot so that they don't need to worry about making it to the polling place (they live far enough from work that this is an issue). I'm starting to wonder if they have the right idea.
Posted by Steven at June 6, 2006 09:05 AM
Comments
I'm a big fan of Oregon's vote by mail system. Basically everyone in the state votes by "absentee" ballot--you get the ballot in the mail about three weeks before it's due, and then you can either mail it back or drop it in a variety of boxes around town. Of course, this has its own problems (what if the ballot gets lost in the mail? How can you check that the person whose name is on the ballot and the person who actually voted were the same?). But, it's very convenient and it makes it east to research candidates who you hadn't heard about before seeing the ballot.
Posted by: Kristen at June 8, 2006 07:22 PM
