57% of counties in U.S. will use paper ballots

Unlike touchscreens, paper ballots won’t malfunction or be victimized by hackers.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — 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.

Because of growth in the electorate over the past decade, expansion of absentee voting rules, and expectations of high turnout for the contest between Barack Obama and John McCain, some experts are predicting a record number of Americans will cast ballots on paper this year.

In 2000, about 97 million registered voters lived in counties that relied on some form of paper ballot. That figure 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. And counting all the paper could hold up the results of the election.

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. The ballots are then read by digital scanners.

Unlike touchscreens, paper can’t malfunction or be hacked into. But it has to be printed, shipped and securely stored before and after Election Day. Counties already paying to warehouse electronic machines will have to buy reams of card stock, print extras in multiple languages, pay for delivery and eventually destroy the unused ballots.

In counties that are on their third system in three presidential contests, officials are retraining workers in how to use the equipment and demonstrate it to voters.

Broward County, Fla., which was caught in the punch-card maelstrom in 2000, has produced guides showing voters how to feed their paper ballots into the scanners.

Other counties making the switch, including some of California’s largest, are planning to collect ballots at polling places and pay workers overtime to feed them into industrial-size scanners at central offices.

None of that is likely to prevent voters from making other sorts of mistakes, such as filling in the wrong oval or using the wrong color pen.

With fewer than 100 days until Nov. 4, the first concern for many election officials is making sure they will be able to get all their ballots printed between the time the national, state and local slates have been selected and Election Day.

California, the nation’s biggest electoral prize, with more than 16 million people registered to vote, abruptly outlawed most electronic machines last summer, creating a potential crunch in the highly specialized ballot-printing industry.

Last week, Ohio’s secretary of state ordered all 53 counties using electronic machines to print paper ballots to accommodate voters in November who opt out of e-voting.

A similar order during the primary resulted in the pulping of more than a million unused ballots after only 14,484 voters asked for them.