No paper. Just a screen and a place to insert a key card about the size of an ATM card.
That’s what you’ll see when you walk into the voting booth at a polling place starting Sept. 17.
When you check in with the poll worker, you’ll be given a key card. Just put the card in the screen-touch voting device, which in fact will resemble your bank’s ATM machine.
Here’s what will happen:
• The key card will tell the machine your precinct and the candidates and issues you are entitled to vote for. Bingo, your ballot will appear on the machine.
• Just touch the appropriate place on the screen to cast a ballot. The machine won’t let you vote more than once or vote for too many candidates in a single race. But it will let you skip a race if you feel you don’t know enough about it to vote.
• At the end, you can review your choices and change your mind if you wish. But once you push the button on the screen to cast your ballot, it’s like dropping a paper ballot into the slot. You can’t change your mind.
• When you’re finished, the key card is ejected and you return it to the poll worker.
You won’t be able to sneak it out and give it to someone else to vote with, because it remains active for only a short period of time, Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger said. That’s one of the levels of security built into the system, he said.
This story was originally printed in the Everett Herald.
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