TG>>What's wrong with voting machines? In my county, we've been using electronic voting machines for about 5 years now


DD >I don't recall saying that I thought there was anything wrong with them.. I thought you were the one advocating their elimination and was expressing the notion that perhaps, given a bulletproof method, a magnetice card with PIN (as some others have suggested) might be a viable alternative.

I don't consider what they were using a Florida to be a voting machine. A voting machine doesn't involve giving the voter any kind of piece of paper. You walk in, close the curtains (if appropriate), press buttons or levers to make your choose, then press a button or pull a lever to register your votes.

The machine knows how many votes you can cast for each office and prevents you from casting more than that. The way you change your vote varies with the machine - on mechanical machines, you have to flip the lever you already pressed back up, then flip the lever for the candidate you want. On the electronic machines that I use, I think pressing a button for a candidate clears the other candidates for the same office.

Tamar