But election officials see ballot-marking devices
as improvements over paperless touchscreens,
which were used by 27 percent of voters in 2018.
They like them because the touchscreens are
familiar to voters, looking and feeling like what
they have been using for nearly two decades,
and officials can use one voting method
for everyone.
Michael Anderson, elections director for
Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County, said “voters
want it.” The county offers voters both machine-
and hand-marked ballots.
“When we give them a paper ballot, the very first
thing they say to us is, ‘We’re going back in time,’”
he said.
New York State election commission co-chair
Douglas Kellner was an early critic of paperless
electronic voting machines. But he is confident
in a ballot-marking device, the ImageCast
Evolution by Dominion, certified for use in his
state. He said safeguards built into the machines
and security protocols make a hack of the Image
Evolution “extraordinarily unlikely.”
But Jones is among experts who think today’s
ballot-marking devices undermine the very idea
of retaining a paper record that can be used in
audits and recounts. It’s an idea supported by
a 2018 National Academies of Sciences report
that favors hand-marked paper ballots tallied by
optical scanners. Some 70 percent of U.S. voters
used them in the past two presidential elections
and will do so again in November.
One state, Colorado, is banning bar codes from
ballot-marking voting machines beginning
in 2021.