May 4th, 2007
Florida ends experiment with touch screen voting
Yesterday, the Florida Legislature voted 118-0 to spend $28 million to scrap touch screen voting machines and replace them with optical-scan paper ballots. Most Florida counties already use the paper ballot system, but 15 had opted to use the touch screen systems.
The overwhelming vote probably has more to do with the other measure this was coupled with–moving up Florida's primary–rather than the voting machine issue.
Still, Florida offers sound pragmatic grounding for the often theoretical arguments about whether optical scan paper ballot systems work, whether they scale, and so on. Having tried both, Florida has chosen to get rid of the touch screen systems. Other states ought to be paying attention.
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
