Paper ballots return to MD in '10

[javasaurus]

According to this article Maryland will again have paperless, unrecountable ballots for this election, but will return to a paper ballot system for 2010.

Better late than never, but paperless should never have happened at all.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

gee, remaining paperless while we go through one of the most critical presidential election seasons in recent memory, yet magically paper will be ready for an interim congressional election that (I think) doesn't even involve a MD Senate seat up for grabs?

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

Return to paper? PG County was levers from at least 1976 until 2002 based on my memories. Granted levers are harder to recount in some ways (but much better in many).

I LOVE the idea of OCR technology. You can do a recount at the same time as the original (feed the documents through 2 machines in sequence and compare them.

Now, I agree with Acroyear; there is NO reason to put it off. We can't do it by the primary but doing programing of the machines and creating ballots for November is fairly simple (this IS what I do for a living, I can state that). Heck, why can't we go to the old lever machines. They are pretty secure, anonymous (WOOT!), and done correctly; solid technology.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Other parts of Maryland used a paper ballot.

As for levers, there's no way to recount individual votes on them, on recount the machine tallies, unless it also generates a paper readout of some sort (I don't think they do). They're more difficult to tamper with, since they'd have to be validated and reset by election judges, and cannot be programmed to change their tallies half-way through. But they also no longer make them...

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

What they did is have a representative from each party supervise the checking of the machines. They would count the cards turned in and compare that to the count of votes on the machine (every hour). They would read off the votes (every hour) with one judge reading, one judge writing and the observers. So, you could do recounts in the hour by hour bit. Not as solid a recount but given the lack of risk of 'mis-read' by the machine, not a bad one either. No 'double votes' etc.

Why don't they make them anymore?