10/28 Here is a stupid question of the day. Since butterfly ballot doesn't
work, and electronic voting machine sucks, why don't we just use
*SCANTRONS* for ballot? Anyone who attend a year or two of high
school would be very familar with this system, and scantron is a
relatively fast accurate means of casting a vote, no?
\_ not sure why anyone uses the butterfly ballot, good question
\_ This is how we do it in my county (Northern CA). Each issue on the
ballot has a rectangle next to it. We use purple felt-tip pens to
fill in the rectangles. These systems are referred to "optical"
systems among the voting machines. They have the lowest rate of
ballot spoilage of all methods IIRC.
\_ We're using scantrons as of 2004 in L.A. County too, I believe.
\_ San Francisco uses Optical scan as well. It is by far and away
considered to be the best overall method, but I believe the
machines are very expensive compared to the Diebold type
devices. Counties don't want to pay for expensive things like
that.
\_ Well, you know there's a government subsidy on voting
machines with easily fakable vote counts.
\_ Hey, Oregon has mail-in balloting only. They should do this
nationally. No more long line, wrong precinct problems.
They just have to mail them by some postmark, let's say, or drop
them off at specific locations by a certain day.
\_ Absentee has the most possibilities for fraud. I'm for outlawing
it.
\_ Sutter County uses scantrons as well.
\_ How about if people are too stupid to write legible ballots /
vote they have to live with their own actions?
\_ A scantron card is easy to use if you can figure it out. A
butterfly ballot can get fucked up by quite a lot of reasonably
intelligent people. A Diebold machine can crash and lose all
votes on its little Windows brain forever, or have its Microsoft
Access "security" hacked and have votes changed, without any
record.
\_ As balloting methods go, scantrons are a lot better than many of
the other methods out there, but still far from perfect. If memory
serves the most common problem with scantron style ballots are
entry errors, e.g. partially filled in bubble/rectangle, filling in
multiple rectangles for a single race, etc. Though better than
punchcards with their hanging, pregnant, dimpled, etc. chads there
is still the possibility of inaccuracy when interpreting voter
intent.
Scantrons are *WAY* cheaper than computerized touch-screen
DRE voting systems, but most of the scantron voting systems are
made by the same companies that make DRE voting systems. Since
there's more profit to be made on DRE systems than scantrons, the
companies are much more aggressive about selling the DRE systems.
It's a pretty easy sell since many election supervisors are fairly
clueless when it comes to technology, and the DRE systems have a
much higher ``gee-whiz, ain't computers cool'' factor than
scantrons. The money allocated by HAVA (Help America Vote Act) can
only be spent on election equipment/maintenance, and if local
officials don't spend it, it disappears so there's no incentive to
buy scantrons for price reasons.
One other thing to consider is that scantron ballot counting
devices are potentially hackable, though, IMO, much less so than
most DRE systems. Of course, you have a paper trail for manual
recounts which is definitely an improvement over DRE's.
-dans |
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