[ale] voting machines

[Ronald Chmara]

On Jun 13, 2004, at 11:36 AM, Irv Mullins wrote:
> My question is: how many citizens have you heard who
> are demanding computerized voting?
>
> The beneficiaries are, it seems:

6. Voters who prefer ballots in languages other than english. Say, an  
american citizen who speaks chinese as his first language, but lives in  
an area with too small a population to justify additional language  
ballots. A computerized ballot means that virtually any written  
language can be used on the ballot.

7. The disabled, especially the visually impaired. Text-to-speech  
computer systems mean that they can vote without trusting a polling  
clerk to actually record their desired ballot choices.

8. Illiterate voters. Text-to-speech, again.

9. Voters who realized that many of their prior ballots may have not  
been counted, because many current methods do not have decent detection  
of undervoting/overvoting. Computerized voting can eliminate  
overvoting, and warn about undervoting (It has a better track record on  
both than many other systems).

It's not all just an evil conspiracy. However, the conspiracy junkies  
may find some amusement in what charities computerized voting companies  
are giving to, lately.... :-)

Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11FRI1.html

Resulting slashdot story:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/11/ 
171209&mode=nested&tid=103&tid=126&tid=99

-Bop