Larry asks:

> How do you know they work great?  How do you know if your vote was counted.
> According to the national news between 6-10% of these voter cards are not
> counted due to errors.

The devices that John and I are describing are completely electronic,
direct-record voting machines. They both instantly totalize and create an
audit trail in a sealed electronic cassette. There is absolutely no paper
involved in the process.

If I remember correctly from my turn as a poll worker, the cassettes are read
immediately using a hand-held reader/totalizer that you plug into the
cassette. At the end of voting, two or three judges move from machine to
machine gathering the totals for all of the machines used at the precinct and
then compare their readouts to create the official (but not yet certified)
count from the precinct. The entire procedure takes only a few minutes. But
more importantly, I would NOT expect that the error rate to be 5 or 6%.
Rather I would expect basically the same level of error from the machine that
I expect from the HP3000: absolutely zero.

The votes for each machine remain in the sealed cassettes, which are
removable and are available for re-inspection at any time, as well as
printout. In addition to every vote being instantly totalled, every vote is
also stored in a multiply redundant audit trail using error-checked memory.

For a better picture of the computer part of the machine, an image of the
back of the machine is available at a Japanese web site:

     http://www.jidpo.or.jp/idsa/business/index-e.html

Wirt Atmar