Bosco,
The question is, for instance, can an illiterate holding down 2 1/2 jobs still get to vote for his/her favorite candidate(s) with minimal error rate! By studying the undervote, overvote, mispunched and penciled in, system designers can make a better use of technologies to prevent such recurrences. Certainly, these system designers can also design focus grps and ergonomic lab tests etc, but the data are already out there, why not use it?
I agree, except that the new counters, from what I understand, are not "studying" the ballots, they're not examing all the ballots -- just the under/over votes, and they don't appear to be parties that are involved in improving the process (from what I recall, one was a newspaper, there was one group from the left and one from the right, and I forget who the fourth was).
I do agree with your sentiment, but the question I would ask would be whether we even want to try to improve the current process at all. What not replace it with something that doesn't have the possibility of hanging or dimpled chads? If anything comes out of an examination of the paper process, my guess is that it will be that the state legislatures will tighten up their own specs as to what counts as a vote (and, just as a WAG, I'll bet that most of them select the 2-corner rule).
Dave |
