Lenore Rapalski and Nancy Bunn of the Syracuse League of Women Voters have been working on public education about the need for paper ballot/optical scan voting systems.

They traveled on Thursday, January 5, 2006, to Rochester to observe a demonstration of voting machines - both DREs (touch screen computers) and PB/OS (paper ballots/optical scanners).

Nancy Bunn's report

[emphasis added by wheresthepaper.org]

The visit to Rochester convinced me that now is NOT the time for DRE's. They are not ready for prime time yet.

While observing a few of the machines, I noted that the ES&S DRE had some kind of paper problem and they had to stop and change the roll of paper.

Another malfunction was with one of the Sequoia DRE models. The screen showed English or Spanish to start the voting. When he pointed to English, nothing happened. So then he tried Spanish and still nothing. He went to the back of the screen where no one could see what he was doing, came back to the front of the screen and it still didn't work. That's when I decided there are just too many problems with DRE's.

While waiting in line to see the Liberty DRE model, I observed two of the Liberty people trying to help a handicapped woman in a wheel chair. They attempted to fit her with a headset as it was too high for her to reach. When the two of them finally got the head set adjusted properly she said she couldn't hear anything so they took the headset off and fiddled with it. So much for handicapped accessible.

The AutoMark is part of a paper-ballot optical-scan system but they ran out of paper ballots to test the counter. I managed to obtain a ballot before leaving and in reviewing it I think it's easy enough to complete but the proposals were printed on the back. I don't know if people would be aware that there was a proposition on the back. I also hate to say it but I also think the print is a little small.

All the DREs are huge because of the full-face ballot and even if they can fold the screens they will be a storage problem. The PB/OS is small and the handicapped-accessible AutoMark is small compared to those huge DREs.

I spoke to several people and all said they prefer the paper ballot as they don't feel the DREs are trustworthy. Another observation is that the DREs take too long to vote, and if there's a problem, the lines will be out the door.