And personally, I'm quite content to see that happen. I argued that we should use a system with a paper trail back when Harris County selected its paperless system before the 2002 elections.

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of FloridaÂ’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said FloridaÂ’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nationÂ’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Several counties around the country, including Cuyahoga in Ohio and Sarasota in Florida, are moving toward exchanging touch-screen machines for ones that provide a paper trail. But Florida could become the first state that invested heavily in the recent rush to touch screens to reject them so sweepingly.

Personally, I like the optical scanner machines -- but then again, as a teacher who works with scantron test sheets on a regular basis, i am familiar with the technology and trust it on a regular basis. And it isn't that I don't trust the touch screen system and other paperles forms of voting -- I do. But I feel there has to be a back-up, and I saw first-hand the limitations of the touch screen system this fall when the confusing nature of the machines and their instructions may have given the CD22 election over to Nick Lampson rather than Shelley Sekula-Gibbs.

Hopefully we will gt some sort of paper trail here in Harris county -- and the sooner the better.

Posted by: Greg at 11:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 332 words, total size 2 kb.