>What if the bubble isn't fully filled in? What if it's 50% filled in? What if it there is a stray mark in another bubble?
Count it before the voter leaves, reject any ambiguous ballots with feedback about what's wrong and have the voter fix it before they leave. Repeat until it's accepted.
No, I believe they are advocating that the ballot be counted/approved or rejected in the presence of the voter. This way people will have an opportunity to fix any mistakes with the ballot itself. This wouldn't have anything to do with the votes, rather it would ensure that the intention of the voter was correctly captured.
This is the way it worked when I lived in Indiana. We had paper/optical ballots that were scanned immediately after we turned them in. We watched them get scanned, and could verify that the counter on the scanner incremented (not vote tallies, just a +1 for total ballots cast).
Exactly. Tally votes with an electronic scanner in real time allowing the voter to fix any issues discovered by the electronic system. This is already done in some municipalities.
One of the core principles of the US system is that no one knows how a specific individual voted. This system (if I understand you correctly) requires the voter to confirm his vote to another human, which breaks the anonymity.
I think you misunderstand. You have a machine that scans ballots, counts votes, and then stores the ballots for later hand-verification. The ballots are fed into this machine in front of the voter. That's how it's done presently in many places (including the polling place I visited today).
The suggestion is that, when the machine is scanning the ballot, if it finds something ambiguous it immediately rejects the ballot, returns it, and doesn't count anything, the voter gets it back, fixes the issue (or returns the ballot as spoiled and gets a fresh one they can mark correctly), and you repeat.
Nowhere in that does anyone else see the person's votes (except potentially on returning a spoiled ballot, but that's no more true under this system than the existing one if someone notices they mis-marked something, and they can always just mark more to obscure their original intent before handing it back).
Count it before the voter leaves, reject any ambiguous ballots with feedback about what's wrong and have the voter fix it before they leave. Repeat until it's accepted.