What kind of voting machines will be used in the Democratic primary?

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

When we vote for our candidates in the primary, will we be using the same voting machines made by Diebold, the ones with no ballots and no way to do a hand recount? Will they be touch-screens with secret proprietary code? Is there going to be a paper trail in the primary election? It looks to me that some states will be close.

[goobergunch]

1. It'll be different state-by-state (n/t)

[FightinNewDem]

2. Depends on your state

...or city or county. The law varies widely.

In New Hampshire, mechanical, touch-screen and punch card ballots are all prohibited under state law. Municipalities must utilize either an old-fashioned paper ballot, or one of two optical scan systems, Accuvote or OptiScan. Both systems use a fill-in-the-bubble approach, similar to what you see on a standardized test like the SAT, PSAT, MBE, etc.

The scan ballots have worked well. The count is quick and accurate, and it has actually made cheating far more difficult notoriously crooked places like Londonderry (where the GOP routinely fudged the count) and Manchester's Ward 6 (where the Dems would rig the machines to help down-ballot hack politicians).

In the district where I live, there was a recount for a legislative seat last year. The recount, which utilizes a pure hand count, largely validated the machines. The minor errors that did show up were due to flukey things like a ward clerk writing a "1" that looked like a "7" to a bleary-eyed city hall tabulator.