Cedar Falls, Iowa - paper ballots with electronic touchscreens

[Debi]

A friend of my son's just voted in Cedar Falls on the new touch-screen machine. He said a paper print out came out of the machine after he voted.

Good sign, right?

[Bluzmann57]

1. Sounds good

Here in Davenport, we had (have) paper ballot with optiscan counting machines, similar to what we've had for the last eight or ten years. When I say paper ballots, I mean fill in the circle next to the candidates name. Old fashioned but still effective.

[Hobarticus]

2. Expect Nussle to take 40% of the Democratic primary votes...

Last night the evening news had a clip about e-voting. Then the camera catches the logo on the machine: DIEBOLD. Yippee-skippee.

Still, a paper ticket is a start. I just want to know that my vote actually matches the ticket. I know, maybe I'm being paranoid, but my faith in the system has bottomed out.

[Sal Minella]

3. My county (in Iowa) has these too -- the scanner reads the paper

ballot and then drops it into a plastic bag deep in its innards and the bags are hermetically sealed and never opened again unless there's a request for recount.

In some states, the election workers are required to hand-tabulate a certain percentage of the scanned paper ballots to corroborate the tallies presented by the scanner, but not here.

Edited to add: Diebold machines. I asked the Diebold rep at a meeting about the wild variance between exit polls and voting machine results in some precincts -- how can exit polls be used as the gold standard for free-and-fair-election evaluation all over the world, but in the U.S. we have exit polls showing things like "reluctant-Bush-voter-effect?"

He said he would trust the machines over the exit polls. He was the Diebold rep. Why did I ask. What did I expect, ferpetesake.

[rurallib]

4. Just curious, did he verify the printout was what he actually voted?

[Pirate Smile]

5. CR. They asked if I wanted a paper ballot or to use the machines.

I picked paper ballot.

[Cairycat]

6. No receipt from touchscreen machines in my CF precinct

I voted with paper ballot but asked the poll watchers if voters on the machines got a receipt or print out - the answer was no. I mused (mostly for the benefit of the probably-Repub lady behind me who did vote on the touchscreen machines) that it was "interesting" that most any ATM, including ones made by the manufacturer of the voting machine, could give you a receipt but the voting machines couldn't.

[Debi]

7. You don't actually get a receipt - but a paper receipt is printed for

review and then retained in the machine (actually always retained in the machine just shown through a clear plastic sleeve in the machine). I voted with the new touch-screen at my precinct and my poll workers explained it all to me. (All of Black Hawk County was the same so you were not informed correctly). All counties that received the touch screen had the option to have the paper receipt and several decided against (Money? time?). The different machines made Black Hawk's counting take a little longer, I know.