This whole ill-advised idea arose from the specific language of the federal HAVA act. This week I had a very enlightening email conversation with our MN Sec'y of State, Mary Kiffmeyer:
me: From the page
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/resolution.asp:"Deployment of new voting machines that do not provide a voter-verifiable audit trail should be halted, and existing machines should be replaced or modified to produce ballots that can be checked independently by the voter before being submitted, and cannot be altered after submission. These ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic counts."
Kiffmeyer: Do they give information on how blind or severely visually impaired voters will verify their paper ballot?
Me: It would seem to me that a voting machine could also scan the generated paper ballot and convert it to speech for the visually impaired voter. Text to speech (especially machine-generated text) is a mature technology, and with just a little prodding from their customers (such as yourself), I believe you can expect this will soon be provided by many of the election machine manufacturers.
Kiffmeyer: I love the idea of converting the paper back to speech. Of course most all of them provide audio feedback when done with the original voting. However, the idea of converting the paper ballot back to speech concept is new to me and a great idea. We'll see what the vendors can do as we put it on our list for them.
So there you have it. Through a short discussion, we came up with an idea that would solve the voter verification problem for the disabled while keeping intact the paper ballot in MN! I even had a discussion with a small voting machine company (NOT Diebold) that also thought this was a great idea and very doable.
:dem: