No More Chads, but Florida Voting Hassles Remain

Sunshine state loses millions of dollars ditching new touch-screen booths
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 13, 2007 11:12 AM CDT
No More Chads, but Florida Voting Hassles Remain
Mayor Nicole Rivoire shows how to use an electronic voting machine at the town hall of Noisy-le-sec, outside Paris, Tuesday April 17, 2007. With electoral glitches in Florida high in mind, some French presidential candidates and other critics don't trust new electronic voting machines available to more...   (Associated Press)

Poor Florida. Seven years after the 2000 election fiasco, the state is overhauling its election system yet again, this time chucking touch-screen voting booths for a system that combines old-fashioned pen-and-paper ballots with optical scanning. And with many other states also ditching touch screens, no one wants to buy Florida’s now useless—and expensive—machines, the New York Times reports.

Touch screens have fallen out of vogue over worries about their reliability and their lack of a paper trail. But many election officials still trust the $5,000 machines and cringe at replacing them. “I think it’s a real waste of money,” said one. “I don’t have my heart in it, because I think we’re going 30 years backwards.” (More voting stories.)

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