Paper ballots?

It looks like Utah will be one of a dwindling number of states whose voters use electronic voting machines this November. That’s quite a switch from what people expected after the Florida debacle of 2000, which seemed to put paper and punch-card ballots in history’s landfill.

But a recent AP report estimated that 57 percent of the nation’s voters this year will use paper ballots, which will be tallied using optical scanners, and only 36 percent will use electronic machines.

It’s hard to find good, objective information about electronic voting. I regularly receive e-mails from groups that have a clear agenda to promote. One jumped all over me for a column I wrote, but the objections were based solely on the column’s headline. The truth is, I was an early skeptic of the move away from Utah’s traditional punch-card system.

But I also know that voter fraud can happen with any system provided the right people are involved in the scheme, whether that means an election judge who doesn’t mind stuffing a paper-ballot box or a computer whiz with access to machines.

From the beginning of the republic, few urges have been stronger than the one to fix elections. We’ve had predominantly black precincts in the South elect white segregationists, and a slew of dead people rise up and vote in alphabetical order in the 1948 Texas Senate race, to name only two examples. And those frauds were perpetrated with paper ballots.

Which is why I don’t worry too much about Utah’s electronic machines. And it’s also why I wonder what the failure rates are on optical scanners and punch-card tallying machines.

What do you think? Should Utah scrap its electronic machines and enter the confusing and time-consuming paper-ballot world? Do you worry about every vote counting this year in close races?