Dude, Where's My Ballot?

I just finished voting in CA's primary -- whew! 47 contests, 76 candidates total, and for on-paper voters, 4 sheets! But today, instead of hand-marking a ballot (my preference explained in an earlier posting), I used a DRE. This voting machine is part of the voting system that San Mateo County purchased from Hart Systems, the smallest of the 3 remaining vendors with a significant share of the U.S. voting systems market. Comparing with people voting on paper or turning in vote-by-mail packets at the polling place, I had to ask myself the question: where's my ballot? The answer is in two parts.

As a techie, part of my answer is that an electronic version of my ballot is stored as bits on magnetic storage inside one of the computers in the polling place. It may or may not be not be a "ballot" per se (a distinct collection of selections in the contests), but rather just votes recorded as parts of vote total, analogous to the odometers on the old lever machines. As jaded techie, this strikes me as not the most reliable way to store my ballot.

However, as an observant voter, I can also see that my ballot is also represented by the "paper trail" on the voting machine. As an informed voter (a trained poll worker who also talks to local election officials), I know that this paper is used by election officials as part of auditing the correct operation of the computers, by manually tabulating vote totals for a handful of randomly selected precincts -- an extremely important part of the election process here. However, as a jaded observant voter, the cheap paper roll (like a gas station receipt printer) strikes me as not a very durable way of recording the ballot information that I could have put on nice solid real paper ballots.

But leaving aside questions of paper stock, the combination of the two ballot recording methods is pretty good, and the audit process is great! Though I have to say: my thanks and condolences go to the hard working San Mateo County elections staff who wield scissors to cut the paper rolls into individual ballot-oid papers to be hand-tabulated in the audit.

So, as a paper ballot fan, I left reasonably satisfied, though glad of the ability to vote on paper in November. It's a bit of a conceptual leap to go from a tangible paper ballot in a locked ballot box, to the above non-short answer to "Where's my ballot?" But it's a leap that I think many voters can be satisfied with, or would be if the paper trial items actually looked like ballots (as in the system we're building at TrustTheVote). But it got me thinking about some of the overseas-voter Internet voting pilots I've been reading about. That's enough for today, but a good question for another day, about Internet voting, is the same question, "Where's my ballot?" More soon …

-- EJS