In addition to voting by the traditional paper Ballots, voting machines can be
used. The use of mechanical or electronic voting machines has not substantially changed the
voting process, but it has made counting the vote faster, more accurate and economical, and it has made it more
difficult to tamper with the results.
Traditional mechanical voting machines require the use of a lever to mark the ballot or for the
voter to use a dark pencil that a machine can read. In the system that uses a dark pencil,
after an optical scan, the darkest mark within a given area is counted as the vote. One of the
newer voting systems ('direct recording electronic') has no paper ballot and the voter marks their
choice into electronic storage with the use of a touch screen button. Some voters may have
difficulty understanding how the machines work, so a good education effort on the machines is
required.
To ensure the integrity of votes cast by machine, the machine must meet basic standards (see
Procurement). In the U.S., for example, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) developed standards
after the first machines in the 1970s were found to be unreliable. The National Bureau of
Standards found that one of basic causes for computer-related election problems was the lack of
appropriate technical skills by electoral managers to develop or implement the sophisticated and
complex written standards against which voting system hardware and software could be tested.
As a result, national standards for computer-based voting systems were developed for the states to
voluntarily adopt, which according to the FEC, eliminated the problem of substandard machines in
U.S. elections. The FEC does acknowledge though that current U.S. standards, set in 1990,
need to be updated in order to include the newer technologies that have since developed. 200
Integrity issues that arise during counting of machine read ballots include mechanical error or the
problem of a machine not being able to determine the intention of the voter if an extraneous mark
is made on the ballot. These issues are discussed in Counting.
