The first Georgia voters to test the state’s new voting machines cast their ballots Monday, with some voters in Paulding County praising the addition of a paper ballot and others saying the voting equipment was more cumbersome than what they’re accustomed to using.
Election officials rolled out the new voting system in six counties for local elections as in-person early voting began Monday. The $107 million system, which combines touchscreens and computer-printed paper ballots, will be used by all voters statewide on March 24 for the presidential primary.
A few minor problems surfaced when polls opened in Paulding, located about 35 miles west of Atlanta.
Election workers initially couldn’t program voter access cards, which tell voting machines what ballot to display, because the cards were inserted backward into encoding devices. A printer was plugged into the wrong slot. And one voter had to cancel her ballot and revote because she didn’t realize she needed to scroll to the bottom of the screen on the voting machine to see the entire ballot.
The first Paulding voter, Martha Morris, said she found it easy to cast her ballot on the new machines by Dominion Voting Systems. She said the paper ballot gave her confidence that her choices were recorded correctly.
“Sometimes you think you hit the right button, but you don’t know for sure,” said Morris, a receptionist at the county government building that serves as the early voting location. “Now you have an opportunity to go back and review it.”
Another voter, Ronald McClung, said voting will be more difficult on the new machines. An election worker sat with McClung, 86, and talked through instructions about how to vote on the machines.
“It’s going to be a slow thing,” McClung said. “You have to take the paper out, look at it, walk it across the room and put it in. There’s a lot of wasted paper.”
Georgia is replacing its 17-year-old digital voting system, which didn't include a paper ballot.
As they did with the old system, voters will make their choices on touchscreens. But with the new system, each touchscreen is attached to a printer that produces a paper ballot. Voters can then review their selections before inserting their ballots into a scanning machines.
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Paulding Elections Supervisor Deidre Holden said she was excited to be one of the first counties to try out the new voting technology. The other test counties are Bartow, Carroll, Catoosa, Decatur and Lowndes.
"We love it. It's user-friendly and verifiable," said Holden, who plans to use the paper ballots to audit electronic results after the election is over. "Everything is going the way it's supposed to."
Critics of electronic voting say the new system fails to safeguard elections.
Liz Throop, an Atlanta resident who observed voting in Paulding on Monday, said she’s worried about election security and accuracy under the new system.
"I have grave concerns that people will not check their ballots, and even if they do, there's no way to detect systematic vote flopping," said Throop, who watched the election for the Coalition for Good Governance, a group suing in federal court to seek hand-marked paper ballots. "Most people don't check their printed ballots. Every 10th vote could be flipped, and it would be extremely unlikely that a pattern would be detected."
Most voters said the new voting system was self-explanatory, and they didn’t see a significant difference from Georgia’s old machines.
“To me, it was simple,” said Paula Dobbs, who voted on a county sales tax for education. “I like the fact that it printed out and verified how you voted.”
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