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States ditch electronic voting machines
[THEHILL] States have abandoned electronic voting machines in droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on Election Day.With many electronic voting machines more than a decade old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was supposed to replace. Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting. "Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it actually has properties that serve the elections really well," Smith said. It's an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000 election, when the battle over "hanging chads" in the Florida recount spurred a massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines. States at the time ditched punch cards and levers in favor of touch screens and ballot-scanners, with the perennial battleground state of Ohio spending $115 million alone on upgrades. Smith said the mid-2000s might go down as the "heyday" of electronic voting. Since then, states have failed to maintain the machines, partly due to budget shortfalls. "There is simply no money to replace them," said Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined computerized voting systems in six states. The lack of spending on the machines is a major problem because the electronic equipment wears out quickly. Smith recalled sitting in a meeting with Missouri election officials in 2012, where they complained 25 percent of their equipment had malfunctioned in preelection testing. "You're dealing with voting machines that are more than a decade old," Smith said. Roughly half of the states that significantly adopted electronic voting following the cash influx have started to move toward paper. Posted by: Fred 2014-11-03 |
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