Back To The Past with Voting?

Normally, I participate with a couple of "Wordless Wednesday" memes, but not this Wednesday.

I'm not wordless.

In July of 2009 I blogged a post called "New York's Electronic Voting - Back to the Future". If only I could see into the future - almost 11 years, to be exact, and the Iowa caucus that showed us how electronic voting results could go so badly wrong. 

Since I blogged this, New York State has adopted the electronic voting I described below. 

But now, we must ask ourselves:  Just because we can do it electronically, is doing it electronically the right thing to do?  New York's system may be a good one, as we actually still vote using paper ballots which are processed into a box.  The boxes are not connected to the Internet.

It's like we've gone full circle from 1952.

 The only reason why we have results from Iowa is because all the caucus goers were asked to fill out paper.

So...now what?  Do we go back to the past to record and report votes?  The below is from 1952, the year of my birth., the dawn of using computers, this time just to count paper votes.

Perhaps not Univac, but we need a better way.

Here's my post from 2009 with small edits:

Today I experienced the future of voting in New York.

New York, to the best of my knowledge, is the last state in the union to adopt some version of electronic voting. Up to last year, we were using those old dinosaur lever machines with the curtain - you stood there and had 3 minutes to pull levers for your candidates.

Before that (as my 80 year old plus neighbor tells me) New York had paper ballots.

Guess what. We will have paper ballots again. Sort of.

I went to a demonstration of the new voting system at the Broome County Library today and this is how it works:
First, you have to fill out a paper ballot. You do this at a "corral" accommodating four voters. It is on an approximately 8 1/2 x 14 sheet. There is a square box next to each candidate's name. You have a pen, like a fine magic marker, that you fill in the boxes with. Then, you will need to put this in an envelop (so it remains secret) and wait on line to feed your sheet of paper into a machine.

The machine reads your ballot and if all is OK you hear it drop into a box. It is also scanned and there is also a paper receipt (which wasn't demonstrated). The demonstrator emphasized safeguards so the results wouldn't be hacked.

If you "overvoted" (filled in too many boxes) the ballot is spit back out and I assume you have to get back into the line for the corral.

If you "undervoted" the machine will tell you and you can override and tell it to accept your ballot, or have it spit out to correct.

What happens if you start to fill out a box and change your mind? What happens if you put a stray mark near a box? I had a lot of questions but of course I thought of them after I went back to work (this was on my lunch).

I'm not sure if I'm sold on this. I did find an interesting blog devoted to keeping the lever machines.

THE END?