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| States ditch electronic voting machines |
| 2014-11-03 |
| [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 |
| #7 I can't speak for the rest of Virginia, but in my county, we never stopped using the punch cards. And there are radio PSA spots reminding us to bring a photo ID to vote tomorrow! I can't wait. :-D |
| Posted by: Barbara 2014-11-03 13:04 |
| #6 Darth: We have something similar now in Tennessee except that we don't get a printout of what we voted and a time stamp. Seems to work fairly well. I read about a few situations in other states where the Democrat gets the vote regardless even though you vote for the Pub. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-11-03 13:01 |
| #5 Nice and clean with complete transparency. Such an old fashioned concept... |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2014-11-03 13:01 |
| #4 I liked the test electronic machine Colorado had at the last election I voted in there (2010). It had a very clear display with very clearly separated choices. It did a review at the end showing what it had recorded the votes as so you could change them, and after you finished it provided a paper copy receipt of what you had voted, the time, voter number and precinct. Nice and clean with complete transparency. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2014-11-03 12:00 |
| #3 The mechanical machines weren't much better. Connecticut, for example, "helpfully and prominently" provided a lever that allowed for a party-line vote. Party was in alphabetical order, of course. Write-ins were nearly impossible. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2014-11-03 10:46 |
| #2 Seems like electronic voting opens the doors to large scale voter fraud via hacking whereas paper ballots keep it local and small scale and traceable. Maybe it is just my naivete coming out. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-11-03 10:20 |
| #1 Like maintenance of the Interstate highway system. Maintenance isn't flashy enough to garner votes, so it's passed off to the states, who blame the Feds for not providing even more Other People's Money ™. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2014-11-03 07:47 |