I read your interesting article on Diebold and electronic voting in the 2/24 Columbus Free Press

There's another, more reliable, and cheaper way of doing electronic voting, and it could use existing machines; no need to purchase new ones from Diebold.

There are more than 270,000 ATMs in the U.S.; it would not be difficult to write voting programs for them, and to issue ATM 'voting' cards to registered voters.

A voting system using ATMs would be a LOT less expensive than the $5 to $8 billion projected for using new voting equipment throughout the US, and be more secure than all existing and many proposed voting systems. Such a system could be a very interesting source of revenue for an ATM manufacturer like NCR.

ATMs have very accurate methods for dealing with depositor's (and the bank's) money; this same accuracy could be adapted to vote counting. Banks already have a secure and fraud-resistant system for sending ATM data to central computers.

How might an ATM voting system work ? Prior to election day registered voters would be issued "voting" cards, physically very similar to ordinary ATM cards. These cards could be issued by state or local election officials, or by banks as a paid service.

The voter inserts his voting card in the ATM, which reads the card and activates the voting program. The voter enters a name and a secret password known only to him/her; this matches information on the card, preventing wrong-voter mistake or fraud; a similar process is already used with ATM cards. Ballot candidates and issues are presented on the ATM screen, and the voter presses buttons to enter his/her choices.

When the end of the ballot is reached, the voter is presented with all the choices he or she has made, and asked if these are correct. If the 'yes' button is pressed the choices are presented again, and the machine asks something like "Is this your final answer ?" and the voter is asked to press a confirming button. After this double check no one can be in doubt about the voter's choices. After pressing the confirming button the voter would get a printed record of his or her vote; duplicates of these printed records would be stored in a secure file, thus leaving both a paper and electronic audit trail for anti-fraud vote checking.

The ATM marks a record on the voting card's mag stripe as 'vote cast' to prevent fraudulent use of the card for a second vote.

On election day participating banks could allow part of their lobbies to be used by election officials. These officials would offer assistance to voters in the form of written instructions for use of the ATMs in voting. They could also answer any voter questions.

A 'Voter Information Booklet' mailed to all registered voters before election day would have complete instructions on how to do ATM voting.

Dave Caulkins