Ballot-marking device

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Ballot-marking devices are essentially electronic pencils. Such a device simply produces a printed paper ballot based on voter inputs; no electronic record is kept. Designed to serve voters with disabilities, ballot-marking devices usually offer a variety of inputs: touch screens, keyboards, foot paddles and even sip-and-puff functionality. Audio is usually provided for the vision-impaired.

BDF
Ballot definition file; the code that tells the machine how to interpret whatever the voter's doing out there. Some researchers believe that BDFs could be a major weakness in e-voting systems, since there's no comprehensive system for checking the code or the machines' behaviors.

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A Ballot Marking Device (BMD) based system is typically an accessible computer-based voting system that produces a marked ballot (usually paper) that is the result of voter interaction with visual or audio prompts. The result is a voter-verified ballot that may or may not be accessibly verified. Some BMDs count votes internally (as do DRE systems) and may save voter selection information. For any BMD that does count, save or use cryptography or other techniques to make it difficult to insert, before, during or after actual polling, fraudulent ballots prepared on other devices, any discrepancy between records stored within a BMD and physical ballots produced would provide clear evidence of malfunction or fraud and initiate an investigation to determine the source of the discrepancy and the invalid ballots, whether electronic or physical.