Voting machine are the total combination of mechanical, electromechanical, or electronic voting equipment (including software, firmware, and documentation required to program control, and support equipment), that is used to define ballots; to cast and count votes; to report or display election results; and to maintain and produce any audit trail information. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machine.

A voting machine is provided allowing an illiterate, sight impaired or blind individual to cast a vote in privacy and without assistance from another party. The voting machine includes a ballot box having a plurality of voting mechanisms for allowing the individual to cast a vote. One voting mechanism is provided for each election candidate/each side of an election issue. The voting machine also includes an audio player that plays an audio presentation that guides the individual through the voting process by identifying each voting mechanism.

Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by the mechanism the system uses to cast votes and further categorized by the location where the system tabulates the votes.

The History of Voting Machine

During the 1970′s, nearly everyone could cobble together a “voting machine”, and sell it to local election officials. In 1975, the General Accounting Office’s Office of Federal Elections (predecessor to the Federal Election Commission) signed an interagency agreement with the National Bureau of Standards to develop operational guidelines that election administrators could use to help ensure the accuracy and security of the computer-based vote-tallying process. This report and comments from State and local election officials led the U.S. Congress to direct the Federal Election Commission (FEC), in conjunction with the National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology), to conduct a study on the feasibility of developing voluntary engineering and procedural performance standards for voting systems used in the United States. In early 1984, this three-year effort produced Voting System Standards: A Report on the Feasibility of Developing Voluntary Standards for Voting Equipment.

Based on the recommendations in that report, Congress appropriated funds permitting the Commission to begin developing voluntary national standards for computer-based voting systems. The FEC began the process in 1984, and completed it with the Commission’s approval in 1990 of the first national performance and test standards for punchcard, marksense, and direct recording electronic voting systems.

Voting machine have different levels of usability, security, efficiency and accuracy. Certain systems may be more or less accessible to all voters, or not accessible to those voters with certain types of disabilities. They can also have an effect on the public’s ability to oversee elections.

• «Previous Post

---