Florida to Drop Electronic Voting Booths

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.
Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Several counties around the country, including Cuyahoga in Ohio and Sarasota in Florida, are moving toward exchanging touch-screen machines for ones that provide a paper trail. But Florida could become the first state that invested heavily in the recent rush to touch screens to reject them so sweepingly.

“Florida is like a synonym for election problems; it’s the Bermuda Triangle of elections,” said Warren Stewart, policy director of VoteTrust USA, a nonprofit group that says optical scanners are more reliable than touch screens. “For Florida to be clearly contemplating moving away from touch screens to the greatest extent possible is truly significant.”

In order for people to feel comfortable with a method of voting, they must have confidence that their votes will be counted as they submitted them. The electronic ballots, while they work, did not instill the kind of paper trail that engenders confidence. Of course, the usual nonsense about Diebold working in cahoots with the Bush administration to disinfranchise folks didn't help (but that strangely disappeared as GOPers suffered losses in Congress in the November 2006 elections). In other words, the problems weren't about the ballots, but about Democrats losing elections. Winning an election under the new ballot systems put that issue to rest (though I'm sure it will make a comeback in those areas where they will continue to rely on electronic voting systems).

Instapundit and Ed Morrissey have more on the subject.