I’m teaching about election reform and voting technology in my campaigns and elections class these next few weeks, and one thing I’ve done in the past is have reps from some of the voting technology companies come into class and talk about the technology and the industry. This year, we are doing something different: looking at a specific voting machine for a week of class, the Sequoia Edge2plus. My homework this morning, in preparation to compare this to other voting technologies we have available (especially optical scan and punchcard technologies), was to actually start from scratch, something like a pollworker, and get the machine up and running.

Here’s where we started this morning, two large boxes.

The good news is that here is where we ended up.

Along the way, we did have a few problems, which I’ll try to post video of soon.

One was we had a lot of trouble finding the audio headset port: here is my colleague Rod Kiewiet searching for the port (turns out you have to pull out the component with the colored buttons on the lower left of the unit, and then plug the headset into that unit. And the first time we tried to print a summary tape the printer glitched:
one photo, and a closeup.

More photos and some video later …