Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The first will be a ballot-marking device that uses a touch-screen for voters to make their selections. That system won’t tabulate votes. Instead it will print out a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices, so voters can review them before depositing them into an optical-scan machine that tabulates the votes.

That seems backwards. Touch screens suck. Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manually-completed optical scan ballots into, before they go to the tabulator? Clear feedback would help catch incorrectly filled out votes before they're cast, no touch screen required.

The validation machine could have a very clear and user-friendly display, which candidate pictures are large type. That would definitely be easier to verify than a computer-generated optical scan ballot.

"Why not build a validation machine that voters can feed manually-completed optical scan ballots into, before they go to the tabulator?"

That's precisely how poll-based opscans work.

Central count (for postal ballots processing) is necessarily different, because that sanity check cannot be done, so voter intent must be adjudicated when ballots (or individual votes) are unreadable. It's a sausage factory.

> That's precisely how poll-based opscans work.

I know, we have them in my district, but they don't do all the validation I was talking about. I think all that the current machines do is validate that there were no overvotes, etc. I was proposing a separate machine that would let the voter validate that the ballot would be read as they intended.

Ah. Ya, that'd be neat. Thanks.

I think they want to simplify the human interaction as much as possible to eliminate things like hanging chads, misreads due to erasures etc. This also requires less importance on the other human step which is reviewing as there are hopefully fewer errors in the first place

Although I would favor a screen with physical buttons next to it (not like the garbage you see on ATMs and gas pumps though)

> not like the garbage you see on ATMs and gas pumps though

What don't you like about these buttons? As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, this is a proved design that works well for a great number of people. Plus, the elderly / tech averse are likely to already know how it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com