Voting machines
Cleveland Plain Dealer  Saturday, January 22, 2005

These are the devices we use to cast our votes.

PROBLEM: Sixty-eight of Ohio's 88 counties used punch-card machines in November. The out-of-date contraptions don't alert voters if they choose two candidates for the same office, nor do they highlight the name of the candidates chosen so voters can easily catch their mistakes. "With punch cards, you can't easily check your work," says Henry Brady, a professor of political science and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. "And with a system where you can't easily check your work, you're going to have a lot of errors." 
 

REFORM: The problems should be fixed by the end of the year, Blackwell says. By November, Ohio plans to replace all punch-card machines with optical-scan machines. Voters use optical-scan machines by coloring in empty spaces on paper ballots similar to the forms students use when they take standardized tests. A machine then reads and tabulates those ballots. The machines aren't perfect, though. They don't necessarily alert voters who've chosen no one for a particular office.