America's Voting System

Paper Summary:

The paper focuses on one of the most popular electronic voting systems, the iVotronic touchscreen system, that is already in use in the United States. The paper discusses the complaints with the system in Florida, North Carolina and Texas that have caused a drastic drop in faith in these systems.

From the Paper:

"Given the challenges Florida had with the 2000 presidential election, it is not surprising that Florida's Miami-Dade County quickly turned to an electronic voting system, in order to prevent future 'hanging chads'. The county invested $25 million in a Election Systems & Software's (ES&S) iVotronic system (Songini, 2005). The iVotronic system is a touch screen voting system that is poll worker activated. It is portable and multilingual system that records vote counts on internal flash memory. Using a device called a Personal Electronic Ballot, the poll worker turns the machine on and enables voting. The voters than choose the language they'd like the ballot in and make their voting selections using a touchscreen. Poll workers than move the summary data from the machines onto the Personal Electronic Ballot, once polls are closed. These are then transported to election headquarters, via a computer network ("Electronic voting", 2004)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Electronic voting machine information sheet. (17 Aug 2004). Retrieved March 28, 2008, from http://w2.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20040818_ess_ivotronic_v0.8.pdf.
• Newton, E. (7 Feb 2008). Tally against the machine. Broward-Palm Beach New Times. Retrieved March 28, 2008, from Academic OneFile database.
• Songini, M. (18 Apr 2005). E-voting may face recall in Florida County: IT snafus lead to look at optical scanning. Computerworld, 39(16). Retrieved March 28, 2008, from Academic OneFile database.

More papers on America's Voting System:

• Analytical Essay # 136804 : "Voting and Public Opinion"
• Essay # 5826 : "Voting Reform"
• Essay # 1584 : "The Effectiveness of the Electoral College System"

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