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athenot

Since I voted in Georgia on these machines, the process is the following:

- get ID validated & ability to vote

- get an initialized smart card

- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff

- submit, get printout from printer

- scan printout into a machine

- return smart card

At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.

The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.

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So you take the printout from one machine and insert it into another to be scanned? I agree that would satisfy auditability, since you can look at the printout and make sure it's correct.

Were these Dominion voting machines?

In Ohio, we used the same Dominion voting systems with the same process:

Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.

I feel so disconnected from this process here in California - I haven't been asked for ID to vote ever. AFAIK, we're not allowed to verify ID here...

It's a good thing not doing it. ID verification disenfranchises way more people than fraudulent votes prevented.

I thought that ID was already basically required to be able to live a acceptable life in the US.

That isn't mutually exclusive with the idea a non-trivial number of people lack them.

> ID verification disenfranchises

How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?

The most common government-issued ID is a driver's license, to the point that it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license. So anyone who can't drive has an uphill battle--predominantly blind people, as well as poor people who live in the inner city where car ownership is infeasibly expensive. Another commonish case is tribal reservations, where tribal documentation is usually sufficient, but the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote.

The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.

I wonder why the interested parties don't just offer to pay for ID cards. Seems like this would solve both problems, but perhaps I'm missing something obvious.

> it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license

As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.

If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.

> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote

The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.

I don't know which company makes them, but the machines at my polling site in Washington DC are like this. You fill in your ballot on the machine, which has clear visual feedback as you go along and helps with procedural things like "pick up to 2".

When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.

It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)

Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.

A very similar process in Tennessee. I'm not sure if the machine was made by Dominion, but I had a chance to review the printout before scanning. The printout appeared to pass through the scanner and into a locked container beneath, presumably for actual paper audits.

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