BATON ROUGE, La. - When Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin goes out to replace the 10,000 or so aging voting machines the state uses each election, he will have an abundance of flexibility.
The state Voting Systems Commission, which was supposed to sort through the alternatives and recommend what kind of system it wanted for Louisiana, basically forwarded nearly everything on the table Wednesday: ballots that can be marked by hand; ballots that are marked in a machine.
The one thing commissioners did choose was how the votes would be tallied: Paper ballots will be scanned, counted and locked in a box. They will not be counted by hand.
The 13-member commission was born during the height of false claims that Donald Trump lost his presidential reelection because of widespread fraud. The panel held many long hearings over many months to reach Wednesday’s denouement where commissioners would tell Ardoin how they would like to see Louisiana vote in the future.
Ardoin now will translate those thoughts into regulations, which, after the public has a chance to comment, will be the base that elections hardware and software companies will use to describe what equipment and services they could provide and what cost. The state would then choose a bidder and negotiate a contract.
Read more on the purchase of new voting machines from our news partner The Advocate.
