Ballot marking device

Today, electronic ballot markers (EBMs) have come into widespread use as assistive devices in the context of optical scan voting systems.

For example, Hart InterCivic and the state of Colorado only list BMD and ballot marking device in their glossaries.

In 1937, Frank Carrell, working for IBM applied for a patent on a ballot marking device that recorded on standard punched cards.

This was one of the first machines to attract serious thinking about accessibility; John Ahmann filed for a patent on a punching stylus for the Votomatic adapted for use by voters with motor disabilities in 1986.

In 1991, a Belgian, Julien Anno working with a group from Texas Instruments filed a patent application for an electronic ballot marker.

[13] The Jites and Digivote systems used in Belgium are similar to this, although they use magnetic stripe cards instead of the bar codes used in the TI patent to record the ballot.

[14] Belgium continues to use ballot marking devices, although the new machines use thermal printers to print human readable text along with a machine-readable bar code.

[19] Sanford Morganstein also filed for a ballot-marking device patent in 2003, primarily motivated by the desire for a voter-verified paper audit trail.

All of these print human readable content on paper ballots, but in several cases, these machines follow the Populex model by adding a machine-readable bar code.

Voters cannot easily verify that the bar code matches the human-readable print, but in an audit, a hand count of the human-readable ballots can be compared with a machine count of the bar-coded content to verify that the electronic ballot marker was honest.