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<div>I'm as much of a technogeekfanboi as anyone, but I think that "computerized voting systems" are a bad idea. </div>
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<div>The best voting system is what we now use in Wyandotte County, which is ironic considering our political history: We have paper ballots with ovals to be darkened by Sharpie. The voting 'booths' are 2'x2' square tables with folding legs and a 3-sided privacy shield, all of which is designed to fit inside the table itself, making for a very compact space for transport and storage. The ballot is placed inside a cardstock privacy sleeve, and taken to the scanning machine, where it can be tested for 'overvoting' and immediately rejected, so that the voter can request a replacement for the spoiled ballot. The scanning machine can return totals for the precinct as soon as the polls close, and the preliminary county totals are available shortly thereafter.
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<div>In the event that the scanner fails for some reason, you lose the ability to fix overvotes but retain all of the other advantages of this system:</div>
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<div>An absentee or provisional ballot can be physically identical to the other ballots (possibly with a checkbox designating it as such), reducing the cost of running the election.</div>
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<div>There are solid pieces of paper that can be audited, with no hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chads involved. No need to hold a card up to light to try to divine the intent of the voter. Either the oval is filled, or it isn't. (OK, it might just be partially filled, but that's something that can be dealt with more easily; it's pretty straightforward to have a cardstock template that an election official could place down to frame the oval [but not reveal the name of the candidate] so that a true double-blind assessment can be done by other election officials)
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<div>It should be required by law that a judge will randomly select a certain number of precincts to be audited, (and each candidate should be able to specify a certain number as well) after the vote totals have been certified by the election officials, such that no one who wanted to game the system would know ahead of time which precincts would be audited. We must have complete confidence that the votes are not being manipulated.
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<div>That having been said.....</div>
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<div>If someone wants to produce a computer system that prints out a paper ballot, with the appropriate votes indicated, so that the voter can visually inspect same before putting it into the box, especially to consolidate a lot of races to fit on one side of a sheet, with OCR characters indicating the voter's choices for all (if you've ever seen what tax preparation software makes to send to Topeka, you'll get my drift here)... That would be just fine with me. And it wouldn't matter what software that computer produced the paper ballot, because the criteria for verifying the accuracy of ballot totals are based on human readability.
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