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Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Boston eyes new voting system.
Boston's Election Department wants voters to begin using new, optical scan voting machines in the Sept. 23 preliminary election, shelving the 900-pound lever machines that have recorded city's ballots since James Michael Curley was in office.
Wow. Exciting.

Boston wants to move from mechanical voting machines to paper ballots.

AccuVote-OS [ image ]
Boston chose AccuVote-OS, an optical scan system made by Diebold Election Systems of North Canton, Ohio. The machines generally cost about $6,000 each.
Couldn't we pick up a few Macintosh iBooks for that amount, or a bundle of Dell notebooks.

AccuVote-TS [ image ]

Since Boston is already working with AccuVote, why don't they take a look at their interactive touch-screen system, AccuVote-TS?

Try their system online.

I tried it.

On a Macintosh using Safari:
When you click the review ballot button the ballot is redisplayed and is blank, all my votes are gone.

On a Macintosh using Internet Explorer:
When you click the review ballot button the ballot is a black page.

On a Macintosh using Camino:
It works fine.

Now I see how voting over the internet from home could be problematic.