Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (128708)	11/17/2000 12:00:48 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583735

Ted, there are simpler solutions than some fancy computer touch screen system. The clunky old mechanical voting machines wouldn't have had any of the Palm Beach problems either. Those machines always had lockouts so you couldn't vote more than once for a given office. Of course, computer would probably be cheaper than buying those monsters at this point. Where I live, they switched a few years ago from the mechanical machines to paper ballots that got scanned for tabulation; these could in principle have some of the same problems, but a regular printed ballot would have to be really badly laid out to be as bad as the PB punch card system. Paper ballots with enough on hand to allow for voiding them in case of errors would work just fine, and be a lot simpler and cheaper than a computer per station. I never used a punch card ballot, but I once had to program a really primitive computer by punching out slots in perforated cards that I assume are similar to what was used in PB. From that experience, I'd say it's somewhat miraculous that the error rate was as low as it was.