How should one provide “accessibility” to visually impaired voters when a VVPR (VVPB or VVPAT) is used with DREs or marked paper ballots are produced with a “ballot marking device”?
• Technically, a truly independent and private verification of paper ballots for visually impaired voters would be to have an equivalent to a “voting system based person” reading back the choices as recorded on the voter verified paper ballot. Thsi capability would need to be independent of the voting system manufacturer. The best mode of operation would require a system (hardware-firmware-software) that is commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and preferably based on open standards. • All of the current ballot-marking devices (BMD) use templates to print or mark on pre-printed ballots, or print the ballot and mark it. When these printed/marked ballots are re-fed for the read back of choices, the machines do not use third party Optical Character Recognition or a barcode reader independently from the voting machine. Instead, they retrieve and use the same template to compare the marked areas and then read it back to the voters. There is no difference in terms of independence whether reading f
