Paper ballots and hand counting save the day in Mobile election <read>
Tuesday night, poll workers resorted to the old fashioned way of counting by hand.
Election officials said around 5,000 ballots were rejected by the voting machines, and early Wednesday morning officials found the culprit.
They said a tiny white dot that was accidentally printed on the bar code of some of the ballots.
Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis, “Because of that little error there, the machines rejected these ballots.”
Davis said the ballots are printed by a local company, and this was a simple printing mistake.
Of course you could say this problem was also caused by paper ballots. But the lesson is that whatever the cause, having voter verified paper ballots means that we do not have to rely only on technology. Next time it could be a lose wire or some dust on a circuit in a paperless touch screen.
