Using black marker is best way to vote

On Tuesday, when I voted in at the Howard Community College polling place, I remarked to one of the officials that the voting system is very good. He told me that it would be different next year.

I hope he was merely talking about an upgrade of the machinery. It would be a giant step backward in both convenience and accountability if the current system were to be replaced by a touch-screen system.

I voted on a ballot with large print, using a wide, black marker to fill in an arrow pointing to my choices. Then I fed my ballot into a machine that could read it from any direction, and which instantly checked for conflicts and tabulated the votes.

This is a nearly perfect system. The ballots are easy to read, the marks are clear and easy for either an OCR system or an election official to read.

Obvious errors such as overvotes are identified at once, when they are still correctable. A full count of the votes is available at that site as soon as the last vote is cast. Further, in the event of a recount, a hard copy of the vote is available.

This is nothing like the clumsy system used in Florida. It is simple, effective, and reliable.

While it is obvious that machinery may need to be upgraded and replaced, a change to the touch-screen systems would be counterproductive due to the lack of safeguards against fraud and error.

There is no good substitute for a ballot marked by the voter with a big, black marker.

Valerie E. Alexander

Columbia