BATON ROUGE, La. - Elections officials Monday got their first hands-on experience with different types of devices voters will soon be using to cast ballots in the future instead of the 10,000 or so antiquated and hard to repair voting machines now used in Louisiana.
Nine different vendors briefed Voting Commission members, clerks or court and registrars of voters. Some allowed them to hand mark ballots. Others had touch-screen computers that printed out the results on special paper. Both systems fed the paper ballots into scanners that counted the votes and kept the paper ballots in a secured vault. Both systems left a paper trail to allow elections commissioners in each parish to hand count ballots cast at the precincts on election day, if requested by the candidate or by a court, something can’t be done now, said Steve Raborn, the Registrar of Voters in East Baton Rouge Parish.
The demonstrations will be open to the public Tuesday at the Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge. On Wednesday, the Voting System Commission will vote on what attributes they want to see on the machines.
Read more on the new voting machines from our news partner The Advocate.
