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

[Timms Christina]

I still have a problem with the whole idea that first time voters are going
to be ³confused² about how to use the paper ballot. I¹m sorry but its not
rocket science, I think young voters deserve a little more credit


On 8/7/08 3:55 PM, "chamade at chamade.com" <chamade at chamade.com> wrote:

> Actually yes.  Thanks to Katrina and other natural disasters, the price of
> wood has risen dramatically.  We ship cardboard to China where they recycle
> it and send it back to us.  But paper prices have risen a lot!
> 
> At 02:53 PM 8/7/2008, Laura Westcott wrote:
>> Wonder why counties have to "spend tens of millions of dollars printing
>> ballots"...are paper prices rising too?
>>  
>>  
>> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Jenny Clark <jclark99 at austin.rr.com > wrote:
> http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/nation/08/07/08
> 07papervoting.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."
> 
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