In response to the question "The new system reportedly makes an image of the voter hand-marked ballot at the same time it is reading that ballot. Why is this necessary ..?"

I have seen the unit in action. What's nice about it is having the image of every ballot as it is scanned preserved. This protects against - or at least diminishes the threat of - tampering with the ballot afterwards.

Also, after the ballot is counted, its image is readily available as it is stored in databse type fashion. So imagine querying the system: "Show me all ballots for election district 20 that had write-ins." Election staff can get a sense of what the count is for hotly contested races without going through the pile of paper by hand. I understand that the paper is the final l;egal record and one would always need to go back to it. But the advantages for searching pristine images of scanned ballots do, I think, outweigh additional software.

Vicky

It seems to me there are two problems with this. First, in many states the digital image of the ballot is the primary legal record and the paper is secondary. Second, of course, is that the image of the ballot can be changed so a mark for a candidate can be changed to a mark for the candidate's opponent.

As long as every state changes their laws to make the paper ballot the primary legal record of the vote and there are robust, meaningful audits I have no problem with adding another tool to make it easier for election officials.

I'm with John Gideon.

Additionally...

Computerizing (such mundane) tasks eliminates our right to a public vote count.

I don't see how counting using ballot images is compatible with states that permit correcting ballots for voter intent. How's a manual recount supposed to work if ballots have been modified electronically? Not a flip question. If you think it through, using ballot image scanners add a lot more complexity and procedures.

Cheers, Jason Osgood

In New York Election Law, the paper is the only legal record.

Changing the digital image of the voted ballot would not do anything to alter a New York election result.

My perspective is that this is a product that would tempt die-hard DRE enthusiasts - and there are many in the New York elections community - away towards optical scan/paper ballot if for no other reason than that these folks would not need to go looking through mountains of paper for every (legally non-binding) ballot inspection.

You could vote a digital paper ballot and see an image, and see on a screen how your marks were interpreted for about 1/3 the cost of their new equipment. I don't get it.