The types of voting equipment used in California are optical scans and ballot marking devices (BMDs). Learn more.

Optical Scan: With these systems, you will receive a card or sheet of paper, which you take over to a private table or booth. The card has the names of the various candidates and ballot measures printed on it. With a pen or pencil you fill in a little box or circle or the space between two arrows. When you are finished filling out all the cards, you may bring the cards over to a ballot box, where poll workers will show you how to put the cards in the box. Or in some places, you may feed the completed cards or papers into a computer device that checks your card or paper right there at the polling place to make sure you have voted the way you want to and counts the votes.

Ballot Marking Devices: With these systems, the voter is presented with an electronic ballot and the voter makes their choices electronically. This produces a human-readable paper ballot. Some BMDs mark pre-printed ballots, while others print summaries of voter selections, often with those selections encoded in barcodes or QR codes. Then, voters either cast their ballots on a separate hand-fed optical scanner or place them in a ballot box to be counted centrally.