Optical Mark Sense - certainly the way to go if you want to computerize, except that the manufacturers aren't big Bush Republican donors. I'm used to mechanical lever machines in Delaware and New Jersey (which seem to mostly work well except for write-in votes), plus the punch-card things in California which are boring but workable. If somebody wanted to do an OMS system that had a fancy touch-screen interface, you could have the touch-screen machine print the OMS ballot, and lay out the printed version so it's human-readable, with a bit of extra assistance like checksums, plus have a verifier read it to make sure it's correctly machine-readable. That'd let you have big print for low-sighted people, voice readout for blind people, randomized order for random people, etc. At 11:46 AM 11/27/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

At 12:56 PM 11/25/03 -0500, Sunder wrote:

...

Um, last I checked, phone cameras have really shitty resolution, usually less than 320x200. Even so, you'd need MUCH higher resolution, say 3-5Mpixels to be able to read text on a printout in a picture.

Actually, it tends to be 352x288, which is the resolution of cheap CCD video camera chips. Some of the early cheap digital cameras used that, before going to 640x480 (good enough for web pictures) and then to higher resolutions.

... Don't you think the cellphone folks will do the more-pixels-game, trying to add features that distinguish their model from the nearly identical other models?

They're mostly starting to do 640x480, but they're somewhat limited by the low data rates that most of the phones get. Phones with EDGE or 1xRTT or other higher-speed data rates, and phones that use Bluetooth to upload to computers, are set to do more, but otherwise it tends to take too long to transmit (and remember that for phone-to-phone videos between Japanese teenagers, which are the market driver, it's the slower phone that counts.)