[LINK] New technology delivers secret vote to blind

[Daniel Rose]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 09:42 AM 16/08/2007, Daniel Rose wrote:
>> The predicted argument is "What about the blind people who can't read 
>> braille?", which is of course more than a little silly, but that won't 
>> stop it being made and any audience thinking "Good point!".
> 
> Not sure why it's silly. Many blind people don't read Braille (as in 
> Louis Braille). People who lose their sight later in life often don't. 
> They compensate with audio. As the population ages, this will increase.
> 
It's silly because nobody says "What about the people who can't read English?" and there are more of them than there are of the brailless blind.

It's also silly because they can learn; the argument at the moment is that the blind are (allegedly) denied the right to a secret ballot.  Braille gives them that right, and although I can't read braille, it seems to be within the capabilities of most people to learn.

In other words, braille is a solution to the stated problem.  However, I think that the unstated problem is really "There exists no way for private firms to establish a revenue stream from the voting process".

Lastly, I still haven't had it explained to me why the blind voter should trust their nominated friend or relative less than they should trust the people involved with designing and building the voting machines, so, as was pointed out earlier, you'd still need to put a brailled ballot in the box for the system to be trustable; in which case you don't need the computer to do the voting on, you can just use a pencil.