Great news and awful news about St. Louis County touch screen voting

On Nov 7, 2006, I voted touchscreen for the first time. Here’s the scoop, good and bad. In some ways it’s far better than I expected. In others, far worse.

Great news about St. Louis County touchscreen voting machines

The touch screen voting machines in St. Louis County create a paper trail for recount purposes!!!!!. Yes, that’s RIGHT!

Here’s how the St. Louis County voting machines work: You have a very wide display screen area. The right 2/3 of the display area is a TV-screen type thingy for touchscreen voting. On the left 1/3, there is a long narrow window - and behind the window is a SCROLLING PAPER ROLL PRINTING OUT YOUR VOTES AS YOU ENTER THEM ON THE SCREEN !!!!!!

I think that’s FABULOUS! No, you don’t get to take the printed voting paper home. It stays with the machine, obviously for recount purposes.

Awful news about St. Louis County touch screen voting machines

• The printed paper trail is NOT secure. I watched today as the poll workers opened up the machines in order to change the paper rolls. It appeared to me that the printed tape containing the votes was entirely unprotected. In the old days of butterfly ballots, no one could touch the ballots once they were voted. The ballots went into a lockbox. But with these touchscreens, I bet it’s possible to switch out the voted paper rolls with bogus fraudulent rolls.
• Not enough paper in the machines, and it’s time-consuming to change the paper. I watched today as three of the four voting machines were offline at the same time, due to all of them running out of paper. It was taking the technicians lots of time to change the paper in each machine. The voting assistant told me it was a ZOO early in the morning, as the machines kept running out of paper and the lines got long.
• Not enough machines. There were only FOUR touchscreen machines in my precinct. In the butterfly ballot days, we used to have at least 8 machines for a big election like this one. We might have four machines occasionally, but only for local special elections with expected low turnout. People were waiting quite a while for a machine to open up. And the four machines frequently went off line for paper changes.

Conclusion: I’m much more optimistic about touchscreen voting then I was previously