Record Number of U.S. Voters To Use Paper Ballots
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
SAN DIEGO — Come November, more Americans might cast their ballots on paper than in any other election in American history.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. If everything had gone according to the government’s $3 billion plan to upgrade voting technology after the hanging-chad fiasco in Florida in 2000, that sentence would read “electronic machines” instead of paper.
Instead, thousands of touchscreen devices are collecting dust in warehouses from California to Florida, where officials worried about hackers and fed up with technical glitches have replaced the equipment with scanners that will read paper ballots.
An Associated Press Election Research survey has found that 57% of the nation’s registered voters live in counties that will be relying on paper ballots this fall.
The number of registered voters in jurisdictions that will rely mainly on electronic voting machines has fallen from a high of 44% during the 2006 midterm elections to 36%. (Much of the rest of the electorate consists of voters in New York state, who will be using old-fashioned pull-lever machines.)
