an opportunity in today's KC star

[Monty J. Harder]

 I'm as much of a technogeekfanboi as anyone, but I think that "computerized
voting systems" are a bad idea.
 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.
 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:
 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.
 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)
 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.
 That having been said.....
 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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