Because I am a precinct chair, I can check our stats every day to see how many of my voters have returned their VBM ballots including mine and my husband's A little red note pops up that says 'voted'. Daily early voting numbers also show up.
This year we are getting new voting machines with electronic touch screens; (no more stupid wheels to turn to mark your vote!) after you choose your candidates you print the ballot. If you messed up you can bring it back to the Election Judge, who will spoil the ballot and give you a new access code so you can try a second time. WHen your ballot is completed and printed then you walk it over to the scanner which counts and stores it.
We are going to save a ton of $$ on paper, because we will no longer have to print 800 to 1000 ballots for a precinct which will have 150 voters show up. Unused blank ballot paper will just be stored until the next election. Also, we will have 100% paper ballots at Early Voting, ELection Day and with Vote By Mail.
As an ELection Judge I am so happy to have new machines which are not on line, with touch screens that print out the completed ballot. No more voters putting check marks or X marks in the box which often don't get counted because the scanner can't see them. These machines will fill in the whole box and thus be correctly scanned. These paper ballots will be saved for 2 years.
The other cool thing is the expansion of anywhere voting to Election Day. Basically, if you go to the wrong precinct to vote on election day, you are told to go vote in the correct one, and sometimes you can't get there. Well now if you come to the wrong precinct, we just let you vote. Now the new voting machines will be able to pull up the ballot for the correct precinct, then you vote the ballot and print it for counting. The electronic part does not count or store anything it just pulls up the correct ballot for that voter.
I can't wait to test it out.
= new reply since forum marked as read
