Roger that Tom!

We live in a rural area in eastern Kentucky, our ballots were electronic.

Our ballot is about 2 feet by 3 feet. Large block leaders.

You just press the area indicated on the ballot for the appropriate
candidates or ballot measures,
a little read light comes on indicating your selection.

If you change your mind, just press the correct "area" and the indicator
goes
off in the wrong area, and on in the "corrected" block.

Once you have checked your ballot, you press a large 2" by 4" button that
says "VOTE."

Even then if you make a mistake, you can ask the poll worker to reset it for
you.
That is assuming you have not left the both yet.

According to one of the companies that makes the punch card ballots,
the margin of error is 3.42%. And they have admitted that due to the
"chad" problem, it is possible to get different counts each time you do
a machine recount, and that the machine may not count a ballot with a
partially detached chad.

I don't know about you, but even a 3.42% margin of error with the winner
with 0.0066664% vote margin is a bit much.

We spend more on yogurt each year than it cost to upgrade all precincts with
electronic balloting.

mc


-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Brandt [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 13, 2000 2:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Anatomy of a screw-up


At 01:52 PM 11/13/2000 -0500, Stigers, Greg [And] wrote:
>Which makes me wonder why there is no process in place for voters to see
how
>the machine reads their ballots? The Florida ballot was not well designed
>for this approach (reseating the card would also be error prone), but this
>is not unreasonable.

The punch-card system used in Palm Beach County - and a lot of other places
around the US - is an unreliable system which should be dumped.  The
"scantron" type form that was used where I voted is scanned immediately
when the voter feeds the ballot into the machine.  If it is marked
incorrectly; e.g., the voter voted for more candidates than allowed, the
ballot is rejected and the voter can correct it on the spot.

Of course, if the voter marked the ballot for Buchanan but meant Gore, the
machine won't be able to detect that kind of error.