Florida Ditches Touchscreens for Paper and Optical Scan Voting

Well, it turns out we don't have to wait for the technology to be ready. Florida is ditching all of its touch-screen voting machines and moving to a proven technology:

Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for recounts.

— Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache, By Abby Goodnough, October 13, 2007

Meanwhile, how is the source of these machine helping?

Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactured some of Florida’s machines, offered to buy them back for a bleak $1 apiece.

Now here's a case where vendor liability would be very interesting.

-jsq

Comments

[Lani Massey Brown]

This is also a case where the results cannot secure one voter, one vote foolproof/geekproof elections. Ballot scanners are still stand-alone independent vote counting machines. They will break. They will hiccup. And they will miscount, miscalculate and misplace votes. For sure paper provides recount capabilities, but until our laws recognize and enforce recounts and/or do-overs in all situations where technology produces statistically infallible results, election officials and the courts can still decide the people’s choice.

Lani Massey Brown, A MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW, currently featured on VotersUnite.Org. In BALLOTS OF STRAW when Florida's governor infiltrates America’s voting machines, only one woman can stop him – one woman and the man sent to spy on her.