If you think paper ballots are the way to go, ask your poll worker for one, or vote by absentee ballot. We have paper ballots in Virginia, in case something goes wrong with the voting machines. It would take a nuclear blast to cripple a number of computers at the same time. In that case, voting might not be much of a priority. Our machines have enough battery power to get through an election day, and in my precinct, a fire station, it would take about two minutes to hook up to a generator. most of that time being moving it into position. The only time I saw a vote lost electronically was that a woman left her booth before pushing the button to register her vote, and a man went in and changed the votes to his choice. We should have caught it, and I had to chase several people down to get them to register their votes. I could tell because the voting screens were blue and the confirmation screen was green, and we could see the glow off the screens without having to see the screens. In this particular case, a paper ballot might have prevented such an occurance, but then paper ballots have their own share of problems. Since they are not being used right now, some people think that they would be the solution. It reminds me of the light bulb joke about Virginians:
How many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb?
Four- one to change the bulb and three to complain about how much better the old one was.
If we were to go back to paper ballots, it would not be two election cycles before we were reading posts about what a shame it was to abandon the electronic machines, since there were so many problems with paper ballots.
