Ohio county may junk e-voting machines [View All]

[oberliner]

CLEVELAND - Officials in the state's most populous county are considering scrapping touch-screen voting machines for the 2008 presidential election, saying the machines contributed to long lines at voting booths and are costly to operate.

Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is situated, spent $14 million on the Nov. 7 election and cannot afford to spend that much on every vote, county commissioners Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora said. Much of the money was spent training poll workers how to operate new touch-screen machines.

With even greater turnout expected for the 2008 presidential election, commissioners are considering switching to optical-scan machines that read paper ballots. These machines, they say, are faster than the current touch screen machines because voters can fill out their ballots on paper before they are scanned and processed. They also say they are cheaper to train workers to operate.

Dimora said the elections board should have known when they bought the touch-screen machines that there weren't enough to handle a presidential election. The optical-scan machines are used in other counties, he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061130/ap_on_re_us/ohio_voting_2