Florida Literally Scraps Touch-Screen Voting

Kaseijin writes "Florida Governor Charlie Crist is getting his wish. The New York Times reports the state will replace touch-screen voting machines with optical-scan models by July 1, 2008 — the most aggressive timetable of any jurisdiciton rethinking this approach to voting. The touch-screen machines most likely will be sold to other jurisdictions or stripped for parts."

Re:Will the new system be any more reliable?

[PhysicsPhil]

There are enough problems with arguments about whether a vote should be counted or not as it is, in any system. With optical scanning of a ballot paper, surely there will be arguments about whether what the scanner counts as a vote or not is actually the correct definition of what is a vote or not? The voting system is likely to be attacked by people who disagree with its definitions whatever it is.

The main advantage of the optical scanning system is it leaves a paper trail. If there is a dispute at the end of the election, it is possible to manually recount the ballots. Compare with the touch-screen voting, where no independent verification is possible. The ballots are also plain pieces of paper, so there's no issue of hanging chads or dislodging chads during a recount as in certain elections in the past.

Re:Will the new system be any more reliable?

[jackb_guppy]

Nope. Not on the ones I have used.

1) you fill them out with a special black pen.
2) if you make a mistake, ask for new sheet and start again.
3) you place it into the optical scanner.
4) Green Light - your ballot is correct and you are done.
5) Red Light - you get a new ballot and start again.

Advantages:
Positive and Negative feedback if the ballot is clean and correct.
Voter SEES what is they choose, clearly.

Disadvantages:
Paper pile. But need only until election is confirmed.

Re:Epic waste - HAVA made things worse

[lancejjj]

Maybe next time there is a perceived problem, congress wont rush headlong into an expensive act with a fasttrack deadline because we have to "do something!"

Sometimes you have to take the time to figure out what the real problems are and address them properly before pissing your money away on waste and potential changes that make things worse. In the case of lever machines and pucnh cards, the replacements were a waste of money and possibly made things worse.

Sadly, the real problems were "figured out" long ago, and Congress merely told jurisdictions to take action quickly.

Unfortunately, there were missteps in many jurisdictions. The reasons for the missteps are up for debate, and are very politically charged, but basically includes:

• Inept analysis and decision making
  
• Poor/non-existent understanding of the voting process and related technologies
  
• Failure to include any independent experts
  

In short, their inability to execute wasn't due to the timeline - it was due to the fact that many people who were supposed to be responsible and capable in the area of voting turned out to be inept political appointees who only knew how to listen to the vendors' sales pitch. Instead of involving unbiased experts, they instead portrayed themselves as "experts" and made very poor decisions.

However, to be fair, many districts around the country did make great decisions in upgrading their voting process and related technologies. I think you'll find that those districts performed detailed analysis and included unbiased experts before making a decision.

Why not manual count?

[SwedishPenguin]

Why do they always involve some type of machine to do the counting in the US? Is there a shortage of volunteers to do the counting?
I would never trust a system like that. At the very least, the machine-counted vote should be confirmed later (but before the election is officially confirmed) by a manual count, no matter if there is a dispute or not.
In Sweden, the ballots are counted by volunteers in the precincts on election night under the supervision of observers from the parties and interested citizens (anyone can observe the counting), and the vote is later confirmed when it's counted by the counties, again under the supervision of observers.
The latter process takes several days (it starts on the day after the election) but counting in the precincts is usually done by the end of the day.

Re:Translation:

[Firethorn]

It's actually a component of federal and many state laws - equipment that's not considered sensitive in nature has to be sold to recover what money can be recovered.

I suppose you could use the systems for some non-critical voting purposes.

Re:Do you trust the counters?

[NMerriam]

when Al Gore's lawyers first contested that vote

You are aware that it was Bush's campaign that filed the first court challenges to the Florida ballots, right?

I'm sure you'll happily apply the entire rest of your comment to Bush now that you know he's the one who caused the inevitable Caesar.

Re:Literally?

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Since the article says that most of the machines will actually be sent to a scrap heap, yes, it is quite literal. (Merely doing away with touch-screen voting and keeping the machines to use for other purposes would be a figurative scrapping.)

Re:Paper?

[zestyping]

Ballots in the United States are far longer than those in Canada. Have a look for yourself: NIST has a collection of ballots online [nist.gov].

Here's one example: Chicago, Illinois, November 2004 [nist.gov]. 10 pages of choices, with 15 elected offices, confirmations of 74 judges, and one referendum. We're talking about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude longer than a Canadian ballot.

I do not support unauditable voting computers. I just wanted to explain why the voting problem is much different in the U. S., and give you some idea why the desire for automation is so strong. (I'm Canadian as well.)