Reply #11: One point you may want to address.

[crispini]

We've run across this point here and so far we don't have a good answer: Early Voting.

During the two-week early voting period here, the elections office only opens about 8 polling places, and they are in locations all over the city. You can go to ANY polling place in order to vote. That means that each polling place must have ballots for ALL 4,000 precincts available to them. A ballot could be different for each precinct because each precinct could be voting in different races for school board, state rep, state senator, federal rep, federal senator, on and on.

So, the county considers that touchscreen voting systems are necessary for early voting, and I can't really say that I have a good rebuttal for that yet.

Now, on voting day, we vote on optical scan systems, and yes indeed, they are very easy to deal with. Which is good, because on election day you have to have every single precinct open, which means you need a LOT more election staff than you do during early voting.