What kind of voting equipment will I use?

What kind of voting equipment will I use?

Thea Brodkin (Voter Service Chair) gives expert video advice on: How do I know when and where to vote?; How do I know what election literature is legit?; How do I know what I can vote for in an election? and more...

The new trend in the United States, after the federal government got into the election process by offering states money to improve their voting equipment, a lot of states went to electric voting machines. There's been a lot of controversy about how secure they are and how safe they are. I don't want to get into that, but of course the League of Women Voters wants your vote to be secure. They want it to be countable, they want a recount, here in California. Every machine that's used in every county has a paper trail. Other states are looking at that. Optical scan systems are computer cards where you mark at the polls, usually by pen, and your selections are fed into a central computer at the headquarters on election night. And even mail-in ballots are counted that way. They are computer cards. That's what they call an optical scan. New York state still uses a lever section, where you go in to vote and you put little levers down and then you pull a great big bar and that records your vote. So there's all kinds of equipment out there. It all has to be certified.