[Voterescue] Record number of U.S. voters may cast paper ballots this year

[Jenny Clark]

http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/nation/08/07/0807papervoting.html

PAPER BALLOTS
Record number of U.S. voters may cast paper ballots this year
Many officials shelving electronic devices over glitches, hacker fears.
By Allison Hoffman
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thursday, August 07, 2008
SAN DIEGO - Come November, more Americans might cast their ballots on 
paper than in any other election in U.S. history.
That wasn't supposed to happen. If everything had gone according to 
the government's $3 billion plan to upgrade voting technology after 
the hanging-chad fiasco in Florida in 2000, that sentence would read 
"electronic machines" instead of paper.
Instead, thousands of touchscreen devices are collecting dust in 
warehouses from California to Florida, where officials worried about 
hackers and fed up with technical glitches have replaced the 
equipment with scanners that will read paper ballots.
An Associated Press Election Research survey has found that 57 
percent of the nation's registered voters live in counties that will 
be relying on paper ballots this fall.
The number of registered voters in jurisdictions that will rely 
mainly on electronic voting machines has fallen from a high of 44 
percent during the 2006 midterm elections to 36 percent. (Much of the 
rest of the electorate consists of voters in New York state, who will 
be using old-fashioned pull-lever machines.)
In fact, because of growth in the electorate, expansion of absentee 
voting rules, and expectations of high turnout for the contest 
between presumptive presidential nominees Democrat Sen. Barack Obama 
and Republican Sen. John McCain, some experts are predicting a record 
number of Americans will cast ballots on paper this year.
"More people will be using computer-read paper ballots than at any 
other time in the nation's history," said Kimball Brace, head of 
Election Data Services, a consulting firm. "As you get more 
registered voters and more people in the pool, it exacerbates this 
bigger issue of paper."
In 2000, about 97 million registered voters lived in counties that 
relied on some form of paper ballot, Brace said. The number is 
expected to top 100 million this fall, according to the AP data.
The return to paper creates extra stress on an already-strapped 
election system. Cash-poor counties will have to spend tens of 
millions of dollars printing ballots. Voters, many of them 
first-timers, may wind up confused by the ballot formats and 
frustrated by long lines of people waiting to use the scanners.
All states but Idaho have junked the punch-card ballots that caused 
so much trouble in Florida. But many plan to use paper ballots that 
require voters to fill in ovals with a pen.
"After 2000, there was a widespread revulsion about paper - everyone 
had the mental image of the guy cross-eyed looking at the punch-card 
ballot," said Doug Chapin, director of the watchdog Electionline. 
"But there's no silver bullet. You're trading one set of problems for 
another."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://voterescue.org/pipermail/voterescue_voterescue.org/attachments/20080807/c98b98fc/attachment.html