OpMegs Wrote:On an odd note, I voted today using voting machines at the local courthouse. The machines used solid buttons made of plastic, clearly labeled for what they did, and there were at least three redundancies in the programming itself where it asked you if you were sure that this was what you wanted to vote for.
And then, it printed out paper results of what you voted behind a glass screen for you to go over again, to make sure you voted for these people, making a hardcopy record. At which point, you had to press the "Cast Vote" button again in order to lock in the votes you made. Someone beside me apparently messed up and had to cancel her votes, and I got to listen to the nice guy helping out explain to her how she could just scroll back to what she wanted to change, change it, and then go back to the confirmation screen again.
Personally, I think this is much more reliable than a touch screen of all things. I may be a technophile that doesn't see people's phobias of voting machines, but a touch screen is notoriously unreliable for something as simple as inputting your groceries at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't trust it with actual voting.
I seem to remember hearing about machines with this sort of design around the time of some previous election.
They sound awesome and I wish they had them here. It'd make voting much more pleasant than the hunching over in a booth. (They usually don't have one with a work surface high enough to be comfortable for me.)
Though, I don't see any reason why such an architecture couldn't be used with a touch screen. But then, my experiences in retail suggest that touch screens are generally far more reliable than the people operating them...
-Morgan.