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The primary election went smoothly in Ohio. Thanks, in part, to electronic touch-screen machines
Published on Friday, Mar 07, 2008
Ohio's secretary of state has not mandated the change. She is looking for federal and state money to pay for the switch, affecting 53 counties still using touch-screens. Cost estimates have soared to $64 million, more than double original estimates.
What Tuesday's voting confirmed is that the massive switch is not necessary.
Prior to the primary, Brunner directed local officials to make paper ballots available as backups for touch-screen voting. Afterward, she contended the directive saved the day in several counties. She noted paper ballots enabled polls in Lucas County to keep going when programming errors caused problems. In Darke and Knox counties, paper ballots eased troubles created by power outages and dead batteries.
Those types of problems call for better training and procedures, not junking electronic voting.
More telling is that voters in touch-screen counties across the state overwhelmingly bypassed the option of choosing a paper ballot. In Portage County, several hundred voters out of 45,000 chose to fill in ovals with a black pen. In Franklin County, where touch-screen voting predates the 2000 presidential vote in Florida that generated a wave of change across the country, a mere 800 or so out of more than 200,000 voters chose paper ballots.
Despite worries about polling places lacking a sufficient number of paper ballots, the secretary of state's office found shortages only in counties already using optical scanners. Concerns surfaced in Cuyahoga County (using optical scan machines for the first time) about the security in transporting boxes of paper ballots downtown for an official tally.
In their way, Ohio voters gave a vote of confidence in the primary election to the continued use of touch-screen technology. The theoretical possibilities of deliberate tampering raised by Brunner's office gave way to the practical realities experienced in daily life, in the use of computers for banking, paying bills, trading stocks. Touch-screen voting is convenient. Most important, the kind of voter mistakes that can void ballots can be corrected in an instant.
Even if the $64 million can be found, the state should resist paying for solutions to problems that do not exist. There are plenty of real election needs to be met between now and November.
Get the full article here.
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