The Automark is accessible... no matter what Jim Dixon says

Jim Dixon wrote a letter on 5 February 2005 to Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell claiming that the Automark ballot marking device "is not accessible for those disabled Buckeyes who cannot handle paper." In a recent post, Prof. Dan Tokaji opines "I don't think that hybrid systems such as the "Automark" comply with HAVA' s requirement that voters with disabilities be provided with equal access, including ballot privacy." (Prof. Tokaji's EqualVote blog is a must-read, by the way.)

I believe this to be incorrect.

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I believe that the Automark is fully accessibly to the vision-impaired and can be made to be accessible to those with manual dexterity disabilities with little or no modification. (BTW, I have a demonstration video (taken by the NFB) that shows an Automark (Vogue or ES&S) representative instructing a blind person how to vote, if you're interested in seeing it in action.)

The Automark was designed principally with visually-impaired voters in mind. A voter walks up with a blank ballot, inserts the ballot into the take-in slot, votes the ballot using the audio interface and button paddle and then walks the voted ballot to an optical scan reader. Non-sighted voters should have little or no problem finding the input/output slot in which the ballot is inserted, and after the ballot is outputted should have no problem taking the ballot to an optical scan machine (the ballot effectively ends up in their lap). I don't know what point in this process is needing of assistance or implicative of privacy (and privacy sleeves should add to the protection of privacy).

The principal objection to the Automark has been the echoing of Jim Dixon's claim that it is not accessible as he claims voters with limited or no manual dexterity cannot insert the ballot and then take it over to an optical scan machine. However, this is not the entire picture. When I first heard this objection of Dixon's, I spoke to the ES&S and Vogue Automark reps. about this objection. They said that they were working on (which should be available now) a simple privacy sleeve that fits on the input/output slot of the Automark. So, a poll worker would insert the blank ballot into the machine and then attach the privacy sleeve to the input/output tray. After voting the ballot with a sip-puff device or some other input device, the ballot would be spit out of the Automark and into the privacy sleeve, automatically. At this point, the pollworker returns and takes the privacy sleeve with ballot to the optical-scan machine and feeds it into the op-scan machine.

The disabled voter can vote independently and privately in both these cases. Is this not accessible?