Florida: Touch screens more likely to be flawed than Pencil & Paper Ballots, analysis finds
Saturday, January 22, 2005 at 09:43PM
TheSpook
Florida's touch-screen voting machines
performed better in the Nov. 2 presidential election than they did in
the March primary, but were still outmatched by older voting devices
that use pencil and paper ballots, according to a South Florida
Sun-Sentinel analysis. Voters using the ATM-style voting machines in
November were 50 percent more likely to cast a flawed ballot or have an
unregistered vote in the presidential race, compared to voting machines
employing simple paper ballots. "I'm not surprised at all," said U.S.
Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, who lost a federal lawsuit last year
that demanded touch-screen machines generate a paper receipt. Fifteen
of Florida's 67 counties use touch-screen voting machines, including
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. The pros and cons of the newer
technology have been debated around the country, with the secretary of
state in Ohio this week announcing touch-screen machines would no
longer be used in elections. Generally, Florida has praised the
performance of touch-screen devices, touting them as the future of
voting and the solution to the punch-card machines that added to the
confusion of the controversial 2000 presidential election. While
optical-scan machines once again seemed to outperform touch screens in
November, both obtained an error rate of less than .5 percent. In the
2000 presidential election, the undervote rate in Florida counties
using punch cards was 1.5 percent; the rate for optical-scan counties
was 0.3 percent, according to a University of Florida study. [more]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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