The old is new... (Rusted Sky)

Toss out the advances and...

Florida: Crist wants touch-screen voting machines gone

TALLAHASSEE — Eager to end six troublesome years of touch screen voting in Florida, Gov. Charlie Crist wants every county to switch to paper ballots by 2008.

Crist will ask the Legislature to spend more than $30-million to replace touch screens with an optical scan system that allows a voter to mark an oval next to a candidate’s name before slipping a ballot into an electronic reader — the same way absentee ballots are cast.

The change would affect a majority of the state’s voters living in 15 mostly urban counties, including Pinellas, Hillsborough and Pasco.

Crist will travel today to Palm Beach County, home of the disgraced “butterfly ballot” that in 2000 became a symbol of electoral ineptitude.

This is interesting - remember how touch-screen ballots were supposed to be the remedy for the uncertainty of hanging chads and the like?

My own immediate thought? They're switching back to these because the Diebold machines, the electronic ballots and such... are too secure. You can't, for all the trouble they've supposedly had, spoof them as easily as paper ballots, or punch ballots. And that was a serious problem for a certain party which sees the national political leadership as something they're entitled to, who send out planeloads of lawyers to any place where the battle is close to ensure the votes are 'properly' accounted for.

And yes, I'm still mad about how they tossed out the military absentee ballots in Florida. They were, after all, on paper....