This is such a bad idea.
After years of using a touchscreen machine to mark their ballots, voters in at least three Texas counties will be asked instead to make their selections directly on the paper ballots, by hand, starting in November.
Election officials in Collin, Williamson, and Bastrop counties said they’re proactively changing their voting procedures and equipment in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump in March that sought to mostly ban voting equipment that uses barcodes or QR codes on paper ballots to speed up vote counting.
Some other provisions in the executive order have been blocked by the courts, but this one has not. The order instructed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which crafts the certification guidelines that most states rely on for their voting equipment, to amend the guidelines to prohibit such systems and “take appropriate action” to review and rescind previously issued certifications based on prior standards.
U.S. EAC Commissioner Donald Palmer told state election directors at a July conference that “there won’t be mass decertification of systems” in the near future. Still, Trump’s order has sparked questions from the public and uncertainty about the use of different kinds of voting machines.
Election officials have concerns, too, about the potential cost and complexity of having to switch voting systems. Some Texas counties, and officials in states including Ohio, California, and West Virginia, are opting to make changes now, in a year without a federal election, hoping to prevent disruption closer to the 2026 midterms.
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In most Texas counties — including the most populous — voters make their selections on touchscreen machines known as ballot-marking devices. At check-in, they receive a blank paper ballot that is inserted into the ballot marking device. Once a voter makes their selections on screen, the machine prints them out on the ballot for the voter to review. Then the voter inserts the ballot into the tabulation machine to be counted.
The counties potentially affected by Trump’s executive order use ballot-marking devices made by Elections Systems & Software, one of two state-certified voting system vendors. In addition to marking the ballots with the voter’s choices, the ES&S equipment prints a machine-readable code reflecting those choices that is used to speed up tabulation.
Critics of such systems have argued for years that voters have no way of knowing whether the code accurately reflects their choices, even though the results are audited.
ES&S told Votebeat that it is developing new equipment to meet the latest iteration of federal guidelines, and that it won’t use codes. Equipment from Hart Intercivic, the other state-certified vendor, doesn’t use machine-readable codes.
Both vendors also give counties the option of using paper ballots that voters mark by hand. Those systems still use tabulator machines to scan the ballots and count the votes.
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About 80% of Texas’ 254 counties use machines to mark voters’ choices on paper ballots. In the rest, including Denton County in North Texas and Cameron County in South Texas, voters mark the paper ballots by hand, and then put them in the tabulator for counting. (Even these counties must make at least one electronic voting machine available in each voting location to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.) .
Two small Texas counties — Limestone and Foard — don’t use paper ballots at all, but state law will require them to by next year.
Paper ballots, whether marked by a hand or a machine, are typically considered the gold standard for election security. They allow voters to check their selections before casting their ballot, and create a physical record for audits and recounts.
But is one way of marking ballots better than the other? Some election officials say that with hand-marked ballots, it’s harder to determine voter intent if there’s a doubt, or for a scanner to read the voter’s selections. On the other hand, some say hand-marked ballots allow voters to check for errors right away, rather than having to wait until they’re done voting and their ballot is printed out. And lines can move faster if people don’t have to wait for a machine.
I am here to say that marking ballots via machine is better that doing so by hand. I say this because I am old enough to remember the 2000 election, in which many ballots in the state of Florida, which was famously decided by 537 votes that year, were thrown out for not being able to determine the voters’ intent. You may remember the “hanging chad” debacle, but there was more to it than that. An article in Slate at the time looked at a bunch of hand-marked ballots that had been rejected by the scanner that counted them because more than one entry in the Presidential race was picked. In some cases, you had people filling in the circle for Al Gore, and then putting Al Gore’s name in the slot allocated for the write-in candidate, presumably because that person was unclear on the directions or just wanted to be really sure that their vote was for Gore. Those ballots were nonetheless rejected, for no good reason.
In other cases there absolutely was doubt about the voters’ choice, including some where literally every circle was filled. While we’ll never know what was in those voters’ minds, we do know this much: Had they been using an electronic interface, like the touch screens we use now or even the old wheel-click machines we used to have in Harris County, they would not have been able to make those unfortunate or unfathomable choices. They could pick one, or they could pick nobody, and that would be that.
Twenty-five years later, I cannot see how the argument has changed. There is one way that makes a voter’s intent clear, and another that leaves room for doubt, or for shenanigans pulled by unscrupulous actors, if you want to go down that road. None of the arguments being made in favor of going backwards are being made in good faith. And yet here we are anyway.