OK, I know on the site that we usually talk about the technology that will come into the far future, but today I want to talk about a piece of technology that will come into your life tomorrow, at least if you live in the USA, your voting machine.

As many of us, or at least those of us in swing states, have learned in previous elections that voting machines do not always do what you tell them to do. That is why today, I am posting a little bit on how to make sure that your vote is counted correctly*.

• Bring a marked-up sample ballot to the polling place. This will enable voters to quickly and accurately transfer the information from the sample ballot to the real thing, saving time and cutting down the likelihood of errors due to snap decisions.
• Voters using touch screen or other electronic voting systems should pay careful attention to the review screen. The screen will highlight any races or ballot questions where the voter has not made a selection or has marked the ballot incorrectly.
• Voters using paper ballot/optical scan systems will have to be more vigilant. These systems don’t have review pages that highlight skipped or missing votes. Some vote scanners do have a small screen that alerts voters who did not make a selection in a specific race or who made more selections than allowed in a given race. (It is impossible to make the latter “overvote” error on electronic systems.)
• Once voters realize they’ve forgotten to make a selection on a paper ballot, the remedy is simply to fill in the oval and make the choice. But, the remedy for a wrong selection is to start over with a new paper ballot and discard the old one. Voters who cross out one choice and fill in the oval for another are likely to have that vote nullified because the scanner will treat them as two votes in a single race, an overvote.
• If voting on paper and casting a write-in vote, be sure to fill in the oval, complete the arrow, or do whatever is required to alert the machine that a write-in selection has been made.

How common are voting booth problems? Well Paul S. Herrnson, a University of Maryland political scientist said, “In our experiments, even with the simplest ballot design and the most user-friendly machines, we found voters still cast their ballots for the wrong candidate about three percent of the time,” Herrnson adds. “Depending on which polls you believe, that’s enough of a margin to affect the outcome on Tuesday. Most often, when voters make a mistake, they not only fail to cast their ballot for the candidate they want, they end up voting for the opponent. So it’s a double whammy.”

* These tips come from “Voting Technology: The Not-so-Simple Act of Casting a Ballot”, a publication by Paul S. Herrnson is a University of Maryland political scientist who led a multi-year, multi-state study comparing voter use of electronic and paper/optical scan systems. That means you are getting expert advice here, and ot just my take on things.