Let's find a better way to cast our ballots: Robert Winter (Opinion)

Guest columnist Robert Winter advocates for finding a better way to cast our ballots. Here a woman casts her ballot at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. (Robert Higgs/cleveland.com/file photo)

Robert Winter

Guest columnist Robert Winter lives in Berea with his wife, Penney. The couple has two adult children and two grandchildren. He is a frequent presenter at the Institute for Learning in Retirement of Baldwin Wallace University, a sailor and sometime fisherman.

I cast my first presidential vote in the 1956 election, but long before then I was familiar with the process; the Board of Elections in the city where I grew up made voting machines available to my high school for use in student council elections. It felt much more grown-up than writing names on pieces of paper, which we had done previously in elementary school and junior high.

These were, of course, large mechanical devices, with rows of levers above names of candidates or issues, and a giant lever at the top, which closed the curtain behind you to begin the voting process and opened with a satisfying ka-clank when you finished. The levers returned to their original positions and the votes were recorded on little counters in the bowels of the machine; these were later accessed by BOE officials and the tallies for each candidate or issue recorded and added to the totals from other machines.

For the voter, it was a fairly streamlined process. You could pull a single lever to vote for all the candidates of whatever party you favored, and, until the curtain was reopened, you could change your mind by moving one lever up and another down. For election officials, it was much slower; totals had to be run on adding machines and the process was prone to error, if not outright fraud.

Since 1956, I have seldom failed to vote in any subsequent election. At various times, in addition to the behemoth machines of my high-school days, I have used punch cards (prone to several problems) touchscreen computers (prone to fraud, since no physical reality was involved) and now, the same fill-in-the-tiny-ovals-with-black-ink technology that was used, as I recall, to take high-school SATs back in the last millennium.

It was a major pain then (I have never been particularly good at fine-motor activity) and advancing age has not rendered it less so. It also takes a relatively large amount of time. Surely, there has to be a batter way.

An ideal voting system should be: (a) easy for the voter to understand and use; (b) speedy for both voter and election official; and, most importantly, (c) as "bulletproof" as possible to prevent fraud.

The sheet of paper currently generated by the voter's pen and subsequently scanned by the BOE computer has the advantage of being easy to count and easy to verify (by hand count, if necessary), but it is slow and kludgy for the voter.

The touchscreen it replaced was easy for both voter and election official but it left no paper trail and thus, practically welcomed fraud with a burger and a cold beer. Of punch cards, with their hanging chads and confusing "butterfly" layouts, let us speak no more.

The answer, I submit, marrying it with the other two technologies.

Use a machine-scannable, easily preserved piece of paper, but generate that piece of paper with a touchscreen computer. Expensive? Initially, perhaps; but what is the integrity of our electoral system worth?


Readers are invited to submit Opinion page essays on topics of regional or general interest. Send your 500-word essay for consideration to Linda Kinsey at lkinsey@cleveland.com. Essays must also include a brief bio and headshot of the writer. Essays rebutting today's topics are also welcome.