iPads Give Disabled Voters In Oregon Their Franchise

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Today, in the United States, is Election Day. And despite the fact that this is an odd-numbered year and thus a little short on big-ticket campaigns and such, there’s often still quite a bit needing decided. School board issues, bond issues, and even a couple governor races are getting decided today across the United States, along with plenty of others. And in Oregon, they’ve added a whole new wrinkle to their voting booths: iPads for disabled voters to use and get their votes counted.

They’re the first state to do so, and in the process have opened up a whole new array of potential questions and things to examine as part of the voting process. See, out there, they realized something important about the iPad: it had a lot of useful features when it came to helping folks with physical disabilities. Voters whose sight was beginning to slip past the range of corrective optometry found themselves able to magnify text and more easily read the issues on which they were called to vote. And should sight find itself failed beyond the ability of the iPad to magnify and screen contrast the issues away, the iPad can even use its text to speech capabilities to compensate further and simply read off the ballot issues one at a time.

From there, a touch on the screen for each ballot issue casts a vote, then another touch prints off the ballot in question, and the vote is counted without further incident. One Oregon resident even expressed approval for the new system, citing his arthritis which formerly got in the way, but now was comparatively no trouble between him and voting.

The system’s costs, meanwhile, were impressively low: Apple donated five iPads to the pilot program, and the state of Oregon dropped $75,000 to develop the software for it. To make the rollout effective state-wide, they’d need an extra $36,000 for 72 more iPads, as well as $50 for each printer they’d need, making the total cost look a whole lot better than the $325,000 they’d dropped over the last two years in a bid to provide federally-mandated accessibility programs.

It never fails to impress me, seeing what all technology can do or improve upon doing, especially when it comes to helping disabled voters get their say like this. And the cost savings are impressive enough in their own right; doubly so when weighed against the economic problems we’re all facing.

So what do you guys think here? Figure the iPad can bring the vote to the disabled? Or is this just a big subsidy for Apple? Either way, head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!