Results tagged “voting machines” from Innovations

california voting machine.jpg

Kathi Payne and Kari Verjil, elections officials for San Bernardino County, California pose with mothballed touch-screen voting machines on Tuesday. Disenchanted officials saw elections delayed by vanishing votes and breakdowns. There was evidence that the ATM-like devices were vulnerable to hackers. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Break out the butterfly ballots. After a number of states spent $2 billion to replace old-fashioned voting systems with touchscreens, several of those states are reversing course and getting rid of the electronic voting machines ahead of the November presidential election. Ars Technica reports that states including Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee, and New Mexico will get rid of their voting machines in favor of old-fashioned paper ballots.

Web pick posted by Neil Savage, Xconomy.com




Building a Better Ballot

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from Governing.com Idea Center
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Official ballot, general election, Palm Beach County, Florida, November 7, 2000. From Wikimedia Commons.

 Poorly designed ballots have disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters in recent elections.

 A new analysis of election ballots by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found 13 design flaws that continue to plague elections despite the $3 billion Congress set aside to overhaul voting systems in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential vote.

Given the fears about possible flaws and abuses with electronic voting machines, the California Secretary of State has announced the state will be relying on paper ballots that will be optically scanned but can be recounted by hand this election season. Debra Bowen says she opted for the paper ballots because they preserve the original vote, CNET News reports. Bowen commissioned a study last year that showed that electronic voting can be tampered with or have programming mistakes that alter the results.

Web pick posted by Neil Savage, Xconomy.com