Machines can count IBM cards rapidly, reliably and repeatedly because the cards are small and stiff. The small size and the stiffness allow the machine to place each ballot precisely in a position where it can be read accurately and recorded in a fraction of a second. I was appalled when I went in to vote for the first time with the new Boulder County system. Here we were given large flimsy ballots the size of newspaper sheets which are almost impossible to count at high speed by machine because of both their size and lack of stiffness. This elementary mechanical truth of the near impossib ility of machine reading of large sheets of flimsy paper was understood some 70 years ago when the IBM card system was developed. You cannot have high-speed machine reading if the paper or cards have been folded; hence the admonition that old timers remember, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" your IBM cards.
It is sad to see TV images of people in the election offices struggling with large piles of newspaper-size flimsy folded paper ballots, trying to get the ballots out of the envelopes, unfolded, oriented and positioned properly in the electronic reading machine at a rate of perhaps a few a minute. Seventy years ago we had the technology which allowed reliable counting of the IBM cards at the rate of several a second.
Colorado faced the same problem of updating their voting systems as did many other states. A low-cost, low-tech way of overcoming the problem would be to continue the use of IBM cards that the voter either punches with a mechanical punch or marks with a black pen. Either punched or marked cards can be counted quickly, reliably and repeatedly. Colorado, a self-proclaimed center of high-tech, chose the high-cost, high-tech systems and produced a dismal disaster that is a worthy successor to the celebrated, costly and failed high-tech baggage handling system that was initially installed at great expense at the new Denver International Airport.
Our society is hooked on contemporary technology. I suspect that many of today's officials and high-tech geeks are unaware of the fact that workable common-sense technology was developed before they were born. It's time to abandon the high-tech computerized voting and go back to something that has been proven to work.
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