Word: balloting
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...latest crop of voting innovations are not flawless either. "Direct-recording electronic" (DRE) equipment like touchscreens don't leave a verifiable paper trail. During a 2006 congressional race in Florida's 13th district, where DRE equipment is used, an astonishing 15% of voters cast their ballots for ... well, no one. According to the ballot results, some 18,000 voters hadn't registered a choice at all. That the election was determined by less than 400 votes made the lack of tangible records even more troubling. Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist wants to scrap such machines, saying, "I get a receipt...
...corruption and invisible malware mean the destruction of voter confidence in the ballot, Internet transparency might be the solution. PBS and Youtube have partnered up to create VideoYourVote.org, a project that encourages voters to document their Election Day experiences. Of course, there's just one problem: some states haved outlawed the practice...
...Turnout isn't all that matters. A study of the 2004 election in Ohio, in which voting was marred by lines of up to seven hours long in some precincts, found that the length of the ballot was the biggest predictor of delays. If a ballot included dozens of races and a long list of propositions, as it did in some precincts, it took much longer for a voter to complete it. Every hour, about 3% of the voters in those long lines gave up and left, according to Ted Allen, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering...
...Even though election officials can't predict the future, they could make a more scientific guess in many places. To predict how many machines they will need, officials could multiply the estimated number of people registered to vote by the amount of time it takes to complete a given ballot at a given machine and then divide that by the number of hours the voting booths will be open, according to Allen and his colleague Mikhail Bernshteyn of Sagata Ltd., a business-statistics firm that consults with election officials...
...allocation of polling-place resources is plainly irrational, nonuniform and likely discriminatory," charges a complaint filed on Oct. 27 against the state by the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP. Virginia governor Tim Kaine disputes this charge and promises an orderly election, noting that the state has a short ballot this year, along with 4,700 more voting machines and 11,000 more poll workers than...