This November, after $3 billion and nearly eight years of improvements to Election Day balloting, how will most Americans cast their ballots? On paper.
The electronic, fail-safe upgrades to the punch-board ballots that turned the 2000 presidential election into a national tizzy and eventually involved the U.S. Supreme Court, most electoral jurisdictions have punted and opted for paper ballots.
They'll be similar to the ones used in Catawba County. Ballots will be read electronically and the votes tabulated by computer. But voters will mark the paper ballots with old-fashioned communication devices otherwise known as pencils.
More Americans could use paper ballots in November than in any election in U.S. history, according to The Associated Press.
The hanging chads of punch-card ballots resulted in heated controversy in Florida in the Bush vs. Gore election. Litigation over the Florida count went all the way to the Supreme Court.
North Carolina wasn't plagued by hanging chads. We used paper. These ballots are still a far cry from scribbling an X next to a candidate's name and spending most of the night manually counting the votes.
But the high-tech touch-screen voting machines are too fraught with problems, and many elections officials say the risk of hacking is a real threat.
Some voters, like the ones in New York City, will continue to use mechanical pull-lever voting machines. Catawba County tested a lever machine some years ago. It didn't require electricity, and seemed accurate. The general reaction was that the machine wasn't very user-friendly.
So the county went in another direction.
We wonder how much money is needed to secure a reliable, easy-to-use voting machine that satisfies the federal government's and state elections officials' requirements?
After almost eight years and $3 billion, we should have an answer. So far, the solution is technology some people label as obsolete.
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