No matter if one are conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, we need to ensure that our election system is fair and unbiased. It's the only way that our nation can work.

Technology has given us so many ways to circumvent the security of our voting processes and we will never be 100% certain that fraud didn't occur, but we owe it to ourselves to make our elections as secure as possible.

The only people who should be against something like this are the ones who are intent on gaming the system.

Why in Zeus's name isn't anyone even mentioning Oregon's excellent 100% mail-in system? Easy, cheap, as secure as you can expect to get. I'm not from Oregon, but I can tell a good thing when I see it. It's absolutely absurd to keep on doing the polling place thing just because it's traditional. Oregon certainly doesn't seem to have suffered by letting it drop, and it's increased voter participation. So what's not to like? Damn, people, let's evolve a bit, huh?

Tradition for tradition's sake is flatly stupid. Wake up, sheeple!

In San Francisco we've been using optical-scan ballots for years. They're counted instantly by computer, and they leave a paper trail--the very ballots we the voters marked with our votes.

But, hell, in Canada they simply use paper ballots. Count 'em by hand. There don't seem to be any problems. All the problems we're having have been created, it seems, by unnecessary solutions.

The most tellling line in the article:

"Meanwhile, county election supervisors have raised concerns about added costs of paper computer machines....."

Ultimately, I fear "concerns" about costs will over-ride any "concerns" about real democracy, and to paraphrase, the people will get all the democracy they can afford, perhaps some more than others....

One writer said "Oregon's excellent 100% mail-in system? Easy, cheap, as secure as you can expect to get."

He has never lived in Chicago, where in the days of the old Daley (the present Mayor's father) machine the precinct captain decided whose garbage got picked up and who got to keep his city job. Ditto any other city where there was machine politics, like the Memphis of Boss Crump, or the Tammany macnine of New York, or the Pendergrast machine of Kansas City, or the deep south during the civil rights struggle. If they had used mail-in ballots, what are the chances the voter would have been encouraged to show the precinct captain how the ballot was marked as a show of good faith, or even to give it to him to mark and drop in the mail?

"Secret ballot" means that no one can have a look at it before it goes in the ballot box, even with the consent of the voter. Absentee ballots unfortunately have this same problem and are a necessary weakness. Touchtone voting or internet voting? Same problem. The election judges can't see who is looking over the voter's shoulder.

Canada's system for counting votes is a model of foolproof simplicity. It is cheap, efficient, verifiable, and monitored at all stages. Unfortunately, its days are numbered as technology relentlessly solves problems before they occur. Here is a voter's-eye description of how the system works:

Each member of Parliament represents a geographical district known as a riding. Each riding has various polling stations, and each polling station contains various polls. A poll will usually contain several hundred to a couple of thousand eligible voters.

Each poll is staffed by an official hired for election day, whose responsibility is to check voter's ID against the master list of eligible voters, and to hand out the paper ballots. Each party or independent candidate is allowed to provide an observer at each poll.

Voting is done by putting a mark in a circle next to the candidate's name. Any mark will do, as long as it is only in one circle (the circles are white on a black background, about the size of a dime, so marking "outside the line" becomes irrelevant).

At counting time, the election employee and the observers count the ballots. They all have to agree that a ballot is valid for it to be counted. Rejected ballots are arbitrated by a higher level official. The total for each poll is phoned in for aggregation. (I assume the aggregation points can also be observed by volunteers from each party.) Counting and reporting each poll generally takes less than 30 minutes. After counting, the votes are put back in the ballot box and kept in case a recount is called for.

The simplicity of the rules for marking a ballot make unintentional spoiling very unlikely. Having observers from each party makes cheating very difficult to arrange. Counting in small batches makes cheating during counting essentially irrelevant, even if the conspiracy among volunteers and officials could be arranged. Poll-by-poll reporting means that each person involved in the counting can verify after the election that his poll was reported correctly.

Most importantly, as a voter, I know that my vote was counted correctly.

For my part, I never, ever understood how the logical disaffinity between the proprietary nature of systems developed in the public sector and the necessarily public nature of voting systems could have been overlooked.

Wasn't there even one voice at the onset saying, simply, that if a company can't or won't develop an open, transparent system, they can't submit a bid?

I know this is a sort of "spilt milk" (after the fact) complaint, but I think it needs to be pointed out.

The more I think about it, I believe there's a need for the system to be so simple you could draw lots to have people from the community administer it. The draftees could receive an hour's training to get the complete picture. Even with "open" electronic systems, only cyber priesthood types could really understand and monitor things, and that's really not acceptable.

Other commenters here have described low-tech, minimalist systems, and I think that's the ticket.

I am curious as to what people deem to be the drawbacks to scanned voting machines. In this situation, with which I have firsthand experience in a community of about 12,000, you get handed a ballot with little circles to fill in akin to an SAT test. After filling in the circles, you hand in the paper ballot whereupon it gets scanned into the machine.

Ballots without write-in candidates fall into one bin. Ballots that will need to be hand counted because of the write-in or other screw up such as filling in two blanks for one office get sorted into another bin for the hand count process.

Once the polls close, the raw data gets tabulated immediately, followed by the hand counting of the write-ins and the like.

This would seem to me to be the best of both worlds. Quick and dirty tabulation of the no-brainer ballots and the ability to accommodate write-ins and check suspect ballots from the get go while providing the desired "paper trail."

Even if a ballot machine failed, these ballots can be hand tallied after the fact, for example.

The machines 9 years ago cost about $3K a pop. There is also a programming fee for each ballot format utilized thereafter. I would imagine the technology costs have come down considerably since then.