Paper ballots aren't slow

Think electronic voting provides results faster? Ain't so.

Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation took a look at historical results and found that it's the number of voters that slows the returns, not whether the vote was taken by paper or machine.

Over the years, I've made a practice of dowloading County Status Reports from the Secretary of State's web site on election night to see if there's any truth to the idea that counties using electronic voting equipment get their results in faster than paper ballot counties. I took a look at those reports today and the only pattern to be found is that the larger the county, the longer the results take. There have been plenty of paper ballot counties that got their results in quickly, and plenty of electronic voting counties that had delays for numerous reasons.

Alexander says those who say machines are faster are just revising history.

    - Jim Grinstead