::::::::
Princeton's IT Policy Center found Minnesota's voting system extremely accurate. MN uses the voting system based on paper ballots counted on precinct based scanners that New York will be moving to. Other states with the same ballot/scanner system, notably FL and NH, have unreliable vote counts due to many problems with partisan election administration, loose chain of custody of paper ballots and inadequate audit provisions. In order to insure fair elections here in the future, New York must learn from MN's positive example, and avoid the pitfalls illustrated by FL and NH.
Allegra Dengler
Freedom to Tinker is hosted by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center devoted to the intersection of digital technologies and public life. Here you'll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center's faculty, students, and friends.
Optical-scan voting extremely accurate in Minnesota
By Andrew Appel - Posted on January 21st, 2009 at 11:46 am
The recount of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race gives us an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of precinct-count optical-scan voting. Though there have been contentious disputes over which absentee ballot envelopes to open, the core technology for scanning ballots has proved to be extremely accurate.
The votes were counted by machine (except for part of one county that counts votes by hand), then every single ballot was examined by hand in the recount.
The "net" accuracy of optical-scan voting was 99.99% (see below).
The "gross" accuracy was 99.91% (see below).
The rate of ambiguous ballots was low, 99.99% unambiguous (see below).
