Nothing is infallible
My own suggested refinement to the OCR system would be to have a reader on site.
We're not talking huge expenditures here -- one of the cheap gritroller-feed scanners, typically $200 or less at Fry's, would work fine.
The idea is that the voter would complete the ballot, then stick it in the reader. The results of the vote would be shown on a screen, which the voter would then approve -- or not, as the case might be. If the ballot is approved, two things happen: a code of some kind is printed on the ballot to indicate it's already been checked, and the votes are recorded on site. (Yes, the reader would need to be in a sight-limited booth of some kind, to preserve the secrecy of the ballot. When I voted in the Presidential election, such booths were available, but nobody bothered; we all sat around a table marking our ballots. Nobody seemed to have any trouble figuring them out.)
If the votes were not approved by the voter after inspection, the machine would invalidate the ballot somehow -- perhaps by printing on it -- and the voter would take the invalidated ballot back to the poll watchers and get a new one. The invalidated ballot would go into a shredder *immediately*.
Later on, at the official count, if the official tally doesn't match the preliminary one from the voting-place machine, a recount would be necessary. Short would mean ballots had been lost; overs would mean fraud of some sort.
What I'm trying to do here is preserve the primacy of the physical ballot, which (perhaps wrongly) I regard as somewhat more permanent than an electronic record.
Regards,
Ric
