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Officials hope the Takoma Park city elections scheduled for November will offer more assurance than ever to residents that their votes will be counted correctly.

Dozens of residents lined up outside the city Community Center's Azalea Room on Saturday to participate in the city Board of Election's Mock Election to try out a new voting system that gives voters codes for each vote on the ballot they mark. At the polls, voters receive a number to enter into the system's Web site to make sure their ballot was counted and the codes match.

If the feedback is positive, the city will likely use the technology, developed by David Chaum of the Scantegrity group, in the November City Council elections. Chaum and his research team of students from universities across the U.S. and Canada were present at the mock election to oversee the procedure and receive feedback.

Anne Sergeant, who is the chairwoman of the city's Board of Elections, said the new system was the latest in an ongoing effort to improve the city's election procedures.

"For a long time we counted them by hand," she said. "You wouldn't believe it, but it's really hard to count all those ballots by hand. … So the last election we did paper ballots and they got sent through a scanner."

Scanners allow election officials to quickly and easily count ballots without giving up the original paper ballots, which can still be hand-counted in case of an emergency. But while scanners are an attractive option, voters were given no assurance that their votes had been counted correctly, Sergeant said.

"Basically, we thought we could do better," she said, leading the city to reach out to Scantegrity's offer to test the system in elections around the nation. "It's a huge opportunity for us, even if we decide not to go with it in the end, then we'll still win because of all the experience we're getting."

Voters use a special chemical pen to fill in bubbles on the new ballots, with each space featuring a code of two letters or digits that becomes visible after the chemical pen has filled in the space. Voters copy these codes into boxes on a detachable section at the bottom of the ballot to take home.

Each ballot is scanned in the presence of the voter, who can confirm by a screen attached to the scanner that the votes are all marked before being given a six-digit code to type into the system's Web site that voters can check against their detachable verification slip.

City Councilman Reuben Snipper (Ward 5) applauded the new system after casting his ballot. While the mock election ballots asked participants to vote for their favorite tree and animal, Snipper may see his own name on the ballot if the system is approved for the city elections.

"It adds an extra layer of security. It means that I have this slip that I can go home and check that my votes were counted properly," he said.

He has heard concerns from his constituents in past elections about touch screen ballot machines used in other elections and the scanner taken up for city elections.

"We've all had these experiences with computers where it'll do something we didn't tell it to do and we have no idea how that happened," he said. "I think this is more transparent."

City resident Catherine Tunis said she was glad the city was making an effort to make its election more transparent, but said she would prefer the system to display the actual votes on the screen after the ballot is scanned instead of codes, offering voters instant, on-site verification that their vote scanned correctly.

"They scan the ballot and you look at the screen and all it says is vote recorded, vote recorded, vote recorded for each category," she said. "I don't care if someone sees who I voted for, it's much more important to me to see that my vote was counted as quickly as possible, because what if you go online later and your vote wasn't counted correctly? You can't go back and vote again."

Jeremy Clark, a graduate computer science major at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, said the system had several means of addressing claims about problems with ballots.

For instance, voters who find their ballot was "spoiled" and was not counted can protest and have their selections counted if their codes match online, according to Clark.

Claims that the codes online do not match codes on the slips are also investigated seriously, researchers use lists to determine if the codes that the voter has on his or her slip could even have been on those ballots before attempting to determine if the scanner read the wrong line or if there was another problems, Clark said.

If the system is approved, Chaum will donate several free systems to the city for its participation in Scantegrity's research.