Talk:Optical scan voting system

OpScan benefits

On June 12, 2008 Electiontechnology Undid revision 218952635 by T-bonham saying "this stuff is really just not supported by facts... I'll explan on the talk soon."

Well, it's been 2 weeks now, and we're still waiting for his 'explan' to be placed here. T-bonham (talk) 08:33, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

My apologies talk, I guess I got a bit sidetracked. Here's my reasoning:

• "voters don't have to learn to use a voting machine"
  • This was already here and not removed. Though, I do believe it's somewhat misleading anyway. Whether or not people know how to use something and can successfully use it aren't exactly the same.
• "thus preserving the secrecy of their ballot."
  • There's a real issue here as often you'll have one "ballot box" with ballots deposited in order. If pollbooks record the order of voters (which they often do) then you've got a secrecy problem.
    • In the arcticle Ballot box are seven pictures of ballot boxes, none of them is small enough to have a chance to reconstruct the order of the ballots. If You have a source for this theory it would also be usefull to add in ballot box.
• "voting is cheap. Ballots are just printed pieces of paper, filled out with ordinary pens or pencils. Only a single optical scanner is needed in each precinct to handle the scanning. For small precincts, they can be combined, or the ballots transported to a central scanner for counting."
  • Voting isn't cheap. Printing is very expensive. Ballots are often multiple sizable pages and require printing on special paper. Many OpScan ballots require special marking devices as well. For central count optical scanning, we know with empirical evidence that more ballots are spoiled than precinct count scanning.
• "Less sensitive to voter overload. If many more voters than expected show up to vote, the system can handle this without long lines. Voters don't have to wait for an open machine, they can just fill out their paper ballot anywhere they can write, in booths, against the wall, while standing in line, etc."
  • Less sensitive is at best incomplete. In the most recent Democratic presidential primary and in past elections we saw widespread issues of jurisdictions running out of paper ballots. The rest of your statement drastically underestimates vote privacy and the need for chain of custody controls with paper ballots. Voters should not fill out ballots "against a wall" or "while standing in line."
• "Less chance for failure. Even if the optical scanner fails, voters can still fill out their paper ballot, and leave it to be scanned when the machine is fixed or replaced with a spare. There have been cases of power failures at a polling place on election day..."
  • This is a debatable statement. Regardless, much of this is misleading. Voting machines have battery backup to prevent failure during a power outage.
    • But they may fail for other reasons which has been demonstrated often enough, and opposed to optical scan systems they have to work while the voter is there.
• "Easier recounts. Since the paper ballots are available, recounts are simple and fast: they just scan the stack of ballots again through another machine."
  • Easier? I don't think there's any definition of this word that applies to paper ballots. I think if you review past recounts, you'll find they were neither easy nor fast.

Generally this content was written like a persuasive essay not an encyclopedia. Too include information you need sources and a neural point of view. I hope that "explaned" well enough for you. --Electiontechnology (talk) 20:31, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

• • • --Taintain (talk) 21:50, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

The Marksense System

My state, New Hampshire, has used this type of Optical Scan Voting without complaint since 1996. My ballot still tends to require a Hand-Reading anyway, however, due to my tendency to Write-in myself instead of Voting for an Un-Opposed Incumbent. We're even removing the Straight-Ticket-Option this year, I'll keep everyone posted as to the result of that! 71.233.230.223 (talk) 14:53, 5 October 2008 (UTC)