Our voting rights
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There's a lot going on around voting issues. There are probably going to be three bills that come through the legislature this session. There is a push towards an "all mail ballot". Although this appears to solve some of the problems of voting technology, we essentially already have a mechanism whereby people who wish to obtain mail ballots may do so-- it's called absentee ballots. But a mandatory all mail ballot worries me because unless you hand deliver it to the clerk's office, you never quite know if your ballot will be received and counted. That's why a precinct polling place is wonderful. You walk in, you get checked, you know immediately if you're eligible to vote, and you mark your ballot and return it in a way that ensures your voice is heard. If we vote in precincts then we have the option of precinct tallies. Precinct tallies are essential for GOTV efforts and make it easier to spot errors AND fraud. And recounts are easier to do if a candidate asks for one.
All the mail ballots are bar coded, so poll workers should just scan the barcode and upload their data once an hour to the clerk and the clerk could issue hourly updates on election day. They could also transmit back to the precincts those ballots which came in the mail on election day as well as those that are dropped off at other collection points so that the poll workers can check them off.
That kind of stuff can be easily accomplished with off-the-shelf hardware and software (palm smartphones with the barcode attachment), involves data that's not sensitive (not the actual votes but just whether or not a ballot was turned in) and a technology failure is not a showstopper, it just means the clerk wouldn't get the counts until the end of the day.