Howard Dean, Journalist
So, check out Howard Dean's inaugural column. He makes the case against "touch-screen voting" (no way to verify accuracy of results). A point with which I agree.
It's funny that we approach election issues as if it were impossible to actually use a less efficient, more relibale technology. Almost all the technical breakdowns of our process seem inherent to the effort to simplify the processing of votes.
Why not decide that if there's one area of public policy where we want to buy the Mercedes, it's the mechanics of voting? Then we could go with the most reliable system available, without regard to efficiency!
In June of 2004, South Africa held elections with a national spoilage rate of 1.6%. The highest provincial spoilage rate (for The North West was 2.2%.
In November of 2000, our national spoilage rate was 1.9%. Moreover, "Fifteen states had residual ballot rates above the national rate of 1.9%"
The system I'd be most comfortable with would be one where I just circled the name of the candidate or the option that I wanted. No more worrying if I put the card in the machine wrong... or if the machine is even recording anything at all... it may not solve for all error, but at least it can insure that the spoilage comes from unreasonable voter error (which is at least scrutible by humans) rather than arbitrary machine malfunction...
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Of course, the "circle your choice" without use of machines (hand counting?) opens it to human error. However, it's reasonable to suppose this may be equal or lesser than machine error (or, as you point out, at least more scrutable). Of course, it also requires (hu)manpower and training, two things we don't like paying for.
So I'm not quite sure if this just the human fetishization of machinery, or if maybe there's some good reason for the added layer of complexity (though is certainly no justification for it if it doesn't also generate the voter paper trail).
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