[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: Electronic votiing

[Jan Whitaker]

At 10:35 AM 17/11/2006, Eric Scheid wrote:
>Point taken on blind Braille readers ... however, who says the Braille isn't
>going to be read at all when votes are counted? It would be trivial to take
>the stack of manually counted vote slips and feed them through a Braille
>reader to confirm that all have the same vote.

Eric, given the point about the call centres asking for drivers 
licence as a form of identification from a blind person, I think the 
answer is that they would go in the 'what the crap is this?' basket, 
or be considered a donkey vote UNLESS there were proper training of 
scruitineers.

Now since Braille is a language code of its own, granted it's 
English, but not in the code accessible to those who see and have 
been trained in it, that raises the similarity to ballots in multiple 
languages. Are all ballots available in any language required by the 
voter? And if there is an obscure language, say something from 
central Africa where many new immigrants have come from, what happens 
to enable their voting? CALD is really a challenge here. I heard the 
other day that there are over 150 different languages spoken at home 
in Dandenong!

Jan


Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
commentary: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/

'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, 
there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
_ __________________ _