Photos: Voters go high-tech at local elections

Council aims to cut fraud and increase turnout using new technology...

By Andy McCue, 5 May 2006 17:35

Rushmoor Borough Council also used new ballot-marking technology from ES&S and Unisys to provide privacy and accessibility to voters who are blind, vision-impaired, or have a disability or condition that would make it impossible for them to mark a ballot in the usual way.

The voter inserts their ballot card into the terminal and then touches the screen to scroll through the options and make their selection. Blind voters or those with severely impaired vision can choose to listen to the choices through headphones instead. The selection is then automatically printed onto the ballot paper.

Photo credit: Unisys/Rushmoor Borough Council

Comments

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  1. 1. Graham Coles

    Cut fraud with e-voting? Stop kidding people!

    Little bit of a contradiction there. I trust that rather than just publishing pictures of a polling booth someone will dig a little deeper and expose the systems behind it.

    To accept electronic voting without any consideration of how the vote is supposed to be registered just shows how gullible people are. This could have been a spoof tv idea for all anyone knows.

    Who is to say the votes aren’t being changed between the booth and the count? How secure are the systems being used? Are they patched? Are they running windows, possibly with loads of spyware present altering the votes?

    I know how the procedure for voting by a proper legitimate ballot because it's open and simple; how many people who used these booths even have the semblance of a clue as to how their votes are supposedly being recorded. Have Rushmoor council published the software used for security review or are they keeping it secret?

    e-Voting is far more likely to be fraudulent than the ballot box if for no other reason that nobody can see it working. Any system kept that secret can do anything it wants without anyone knowing about it. Whatever happened to the promise of 'Open Government'.

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