15500 Wells Port Drive

Austin, TX 78728

800.223.HART

FAX: 512.252.6466

Hart's product is called the eSlate – a small electronic tablet, of sorts, specialized for casting ballots in elections. In the summer of 2002, Travis Co. Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir purchased several hundred eSlates and gave them a successful trial run in the early voting period of the November 2002 elections. The county went whole hog into e-voting in the spring 2003 Austin municipal elections, scrapping its optical scanning system altogether. DeBeauvoir says her choice of eSlate was not simply an attempt to Buy Greater Austin, but that Hart InterCivic's machine has several obvious advantages over its rivals.

Unlike Hart's major competitors, the eSlate does not use a touch screen. "I had trouble with calibration issues on the touch screens," DeBeauvoir says, meaning that the onscreen "buttons" that the voter presses sometimes slip out of alignment with the proper sensors underneath the screen. "Not all of them, but some of them. It's what happened in Dallas [during early voting in the 2002 general election, on ES&S machines]; you end up maybe casting a ballot for the other candidate and don't realize it. They've done some things in the industry to try to improve it since I first looked at it, so in fairness to them, I think they have improved their product, but at the time I was doing the review I found it troubling."

Instead, eSlate uses a wheel-and-button system – the voter turns a dial until the candidate of choice is highlighted, and then presses a button to select the candidate, never touching the screen. (As in all DRE systems, the voter can correct errors before finally pressing the "cast ballot" button.)

Secondly, eSlate does not use "smart cards," credit-card-sized devices given by the election workers to voters, who plug them into a voter terminal, letting the machine know that the person standing before it is indeed a legitimate voter. The Rice/Johns Hopkins researchers say that it would be terribly easy to "homebrew" such cards, which an attacker could then sneak into the polling place and use to cast multiple votes. The eSlate voters, in contrast, are assigned unique personal identification numbers when they show up at the polling place, which they then enter into the voting machine. The number's validity expires either upon casting the ballot, or, if unused, within a few minutes of its assignment.

Perhaps most important, the eSlate system has no external connections – no hookups to phone lines, the Internet, or an intranet. While some systems allow results to be sent by modem to a central vote-counting facility, the eSlate is comparatively old-fashioned – much like an old-style ballot box, the devices ("mediums") into which votes are recorded are removed by the election judges after the polls close and physically transported to the central counting station.

(Source)