E-lectorate

The St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners and the "Kids Voting Missouri" program showcased the future of voting in St. Louis City-- the electronic voting machine (with a touch screen), and its less showy cousin, the optical scan machine scan, which is basically a scantron machine that reads which marks are made on the paper. You can choose which mechanism suits your fancy.

Here is the electronic voting machine:

Here is the optical scan machine:

Here is the proprietary memory card used for the machines-- the hand model is Matt Potter, Deputy Director of the St. Louis City Board of Elections

Though the cards are the preferred method of collecting the votes, the original scantron sheets and a paper printout of the touch screen results are kept for backup, and in case a memory card fails, the data backs up to a hard drive as well. Electronic results are loaded onto a private, unconnected server and tallied.

With the touch screen method, voters are given a reprommagrable voter access card, and the machine acts like an atm machine of sorts. There will be four cards per precintct. The vision impaired have headphones and raised letters on the atm-ish keypad so they can vote in privacy. The machines can last 4 hours with no electric power, and cutting the power will have no effect on vote tallies.

With the scan machine, if there is any problem with the ballot, the machine immediately kicks it back out.

Every polling place will have 2 touch screen machines and one scan machine.

Important measures passed by the MO. legislature but not yet signed by Gov. Blunt are the following:

Voters must have a valid State or federally issued photo id, or one that expired AFTER the last election.

Voters will not be able to vote straight party tickets anymore.