Monday, October 20, 2008
US moving to optical mark-sense rather than DRE
Note: DRE stands for Direct-Record Electronic, most commonly in the US these are "touch screen voting machines".
Debate Continues over Security, Reliability of Voting Technology - America.gov - 27 August 2008
As I've said before, optical scan is the least-worst electronic technology, because you can at least do a manual recount of the paper ballots,
but you're still better off just counting the paper ballots by hand in the first place.
The main issue, according to a 2005 overview of electronic voting by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, is that if the record of votes cast exists only in digital form in a touch-screen system, there is no independent way to confirm the votes were recorded accurately and thus no way to conduct a reliable recount.
Overall, in the nation’s 170,000 polling places, there has been a shift from predominantly using manual systems (lever machines, punch cards, paper ballots) to computer-based systems (optical scan and DREs) in federal elections.
But according to news reports, as a result of the controversy over DRE machines, in the 2008 election many states might use optical scan paper ballots that require voters to fill in ovals with a pen.
Debate Continues over Security, Reliability of Voting Technology - America.gov - 27 August 2008
As I've said before, optical scan is the least-worst electronic technology, because you can at least do a manual recount of the paper ballots,
but you're still better off just counting the paper ballots by hand in the first place.
Labels: electronic voting
[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 4:33 pm
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