Mahoning County to switch to paper ballots for November election

By DAVID SKOLNICK

skolnick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Nine years after switching from paper ballots to electronic touch-screen voting, the Mahoning County Board of Elections plans to return to paper for the November general election.

The new and more sophisticated system will have voters cpmplete a paper ballot and then feed it into an optical-scanner machine .

The machine would keep track of the vote totals with the paper ballot dropped into a sealed box. State law requires all ballots have paper backups.

It would cost $684,000 to buy the new machines from Election Systems & Software, the same company that sold the electronic voting machines to the county, said Joyce Kale Pesta, the board’s deputy director.

The county may not have the money to purchase the machines so leasing them is an option that would cost less than $100,000 a year, she said.

Board officials need to speak to county commissioners about buy and lease options, Kale Pesta said.

Also, the county likely wouldn’t have to pay for the lease or purchase until January 2012, she said.

Read the full story Monday in The Vindicator and on Vindy.com.