Philadelphia County will use Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242

In prime battleground territory, Philadelphia county is Pennsylvania's largest with over 1.5 million residents.  About 80% of its counted votes from 2004 were cast from Kerry, and it has a strong history of voting Democrat.  This November, Philly will use Danaher Controls' ELECTronic 1242 Voting System.

Danaher's website says that the ELECTronic 1242  is "Proven accurate and secure in over 150,000 elections" and has "proven technology, durability, and low-maintenance, along with easy setup and operation"...

Philadelphia describes usage of the machine indepth on their board of elections website , but a few things are notable.

First, the instructions tell the reader that there isn't a lever on these machines.  Either this is the first year without the lever or someone at the Board of Elections was sick of telling voters that their machine wasn't missing an arm.  The ballot is one page with a design on these digital machines that "resembles our old voting machines" with a grid of political parties as the heading columns and what looks like the Office up for grabs in the rows, with candidates names in the intersecting cell.  To vote for a particular candidate, users follow this LED-laced UI:

A flashing red light appears inside each office or issue title box in the left column. This indicates that you may select a candidate for that office. When the office title light goes off you have selected the maximum number of candidates allowed for that office. You do not have to make selections for all offices or candidates if you don't want to.

From there, users manually push their candidate choice in a box no larger than one's fingertip, as shown in the second image.  Press the candidate's square again to "undo" your vote for them.  Writing in candidates requires a special black button at the bottom of the machine that allows for handwriting  free text to submit the candidate of their choice. 

Ballot questions are printed at the bottom right of the ballot.  Touching the YES or NO box in a question engages the binary LED, indicating a vote has been entered for the question.

Casting the ballot is straightforward with the large green VOTE button at the bottom of the main interface.  Voter pushes the button, lights in the booth go off, LEDs on the voting machine go off, and "a low bell tone" seals the deal and asks you to leave the booth.

Challenge: Blind Voters

Something that jumps out immediately about this machine is its challenges towards blind voters.  The ballots are clearly printed in paper without any attempts at braille from the images available.  The status of LEDs is obviously not going to aide a blind voter, nor will a giant "green" button at the bottom which is a physical button, outside all the other on-the-ballot pushing mechanisms used on the machine. 

Challenge: Voter-Verified Paper Trail

Philly's instructions don't mention any type of receipt or takeaway from a cast vote.  It appears that the ballots are used over and over again without marking them.  There may be a back-end printer piping out cast votes not mentioned in Philly's process, but at this point we don't know.

Challenge: Hardware and Materials

I wonder how well continuous pushing on the same ballot layout holds up on their hardware.  I'd imagine that after a few hundred pushes with the average index finger would great a dimple in one candidate over the other, possibly causing problems in recognizing votes cast.  The push area for index fingers also looked frighteningly small, and looks like it would require constant recalibration to maintain on election day.  The ballot also looks removable, so that it may be able to swap out one for another. 

Memorable News Clippings, courtesy of www.verifiedvoting.org:

November 2003: Tennessee.  A poll worker in Rutherford County inadvertently cast a vote during a demonstration that may have resulted in a tie for a Town Council position.

October 2001: Tennessee.  In Knox County, a voting machine showed an error code that corresponded to a discrepancy between internally stored vote tables.  Local officials could not retrieve the data or have the machine print out the results.  A Danaher technician was able to crosscheck the internal memory tables and provide results.

November 2000: Tennessee.  About 7% of memory cartridges in Knox County were temporarily unreadable and three cartridges remained unreadable.  There were also problems with transmitting precinct-by-precinct vote totals.

November 2000: Tennessee.  In Fayette County (Oakland, TN), problems, including double counting of some ballots, were resolved after borrowing a tabulation machine from a neighboring county.

So it looks like many of these have to do with the mechanism of tabulation, a chronic challenge at the system-wide view of election machines.

What do you think?  Have you voted with an ELECTronic 1242?