Vote Selection Mechanism

      The vote selections are recorded by an Omron switch, which is rated for one million pushes.  All votes are counted including blank votes in addition to voter selections.  The system prohibits a voter from leaving the voting station without making at least one selection.  The voter selections are placed in voting data storage in the PC RAM memory, then are written to disk, and also stored in the Palm memory that is located in the vote selection booth as a redundant backup.  In addition, the votes are written to CD.

      Vote selections are stored in flat files associated with cells that represent candidates.  There are two different types of flat files – vote file and audit trail.  The vote file is cumulative for the voting on that election day.  The audit trail flat files are representations of the voter selections.  The audit trail is an electronic representation of each voter selection.