I voted today on the new voting machines

[Gothmog]

I like the concept of a paper trail. They gave us q-tips to touch the screen There was one republican type who kept demanding his code and the election lady had to show how this system worked

Link to tweet

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Interesting machine-- and yes, a paper trail is absolute! Our machines are...

getting old and breaking down a lot. We have preprinted ballots where you fill in the ovals and then scan.

This seems cheaper and a lot simpler. Be nice if we replaced them with something like this.

[unc70]

2. New scanners a better solution

The scanner technology has several huge advantages: paper ballots for hand recount, relative cost, simplicity for voters, etc. Plus, lots of people can be marking their ballots at the same time while using just one (or two) scanners in a large precinct.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. True, but our machines are expensive, and we have this monstrous thing called...

Ballot Marking Device that follows rules for handicapped voters and is almost never used. And, the cost for printing ballot books is huge-- heavy stock paper and numbered pages.

This thing doesn't have the huge, heavy ballots, but it does have a paper trail for hand recounts and can't possibly cost as much as our scanners.

We have one scanner per precinct, and no doubt we'd need a bunch of these things to keep the line moving with roughly 1,000 registered voters per precinct. Don't have any numbers handy, but it still could be cost effective to have that bunch of these things.