When the voter has completed the voting he will remove the entire ballot page from the ballot book. The edge near the binding is perforated to make it easy to remove. The voter now folds half of the page over his voting choices concealing then, and places his ballot into the ballot box.
For counting of the ballots, an inexpensive fixture (see below) can be made to aid in the process or you can use an unused ballot by punching out the vote you are to count and folding the ballot page over the ballot. To count, insert the completed ballots into the fold exposing, very clearly, the vote.
In the future when scanners become more reliable and less prone to tampering we have a system in place for automatically scanning and counting.
SVS can be used as an absentee voting system, in fact if these ballots were to be sent out to all registered voters weeks before voting date, the voter would have time to study the different item and make a more intelligent vote. If the voter forgot to mail it in, he could take his ballot to the polls for voting. Paper ballots would be cumbersome to handle through the mail. Folding unfolding and refolding would make handling them difficult for hand counting.
Absentee voting, if the all the states were to adopt this method it would eliminate exit polls and drive the news media crazy, why do we need to know how the winner is before the polls close?
Hand counting of paper ballots can become very tiring. Polls are staffed, generally, with senior citizens who can get confused looking over large ballot. The SVS system with the counting fixture or just the unused ballot made into a fixture makes it easy to count and not nearly as tiring, resulting in a more accurate and faster count.
When voting at the polling place one has to spread out the paper ballot in front of him taking up a lot of room and making it hard to see the issues at the top of the ballot. With the SVS ballot everything is right in front of him and if the voter needs to he can pick it up and hold so he can see it more clearly.
The voter can keep the SVS Ballot Book once he has cast his vote as a record of how he voted. Paper Ballots have no means of giving the voter a receipt or record to keep.
Storage: Paper ballots are large, normally printed on newspaper type material, after folding they are hard to stack and difficult to handle once stacked. SVS ballots will stack easily and take up much less room.
When placing a paper ballot into a sealed box, the ballot would have to be folded 3 or 4 times. Once in the box the ballot starts to unfold and as more and more ballots are pushed into the box they tend to get crumbled making it even harder to unfold and count. SVS ballot are made of heavier stock making them more durable, plus they are folded only once.
Best of all is the cost. Ballot Books will cost the tax payers about 4 to 5 cent as compared to the electronic system which will have never ending costs.
If you would like a sample Ballot Book, e-mail to wealbrecht@aol.com I'll be happy to send you one.
Walter Albrecht lives in Cincinnati.
