With early voting already underway, election officials in a Georgia county have voted to switch from the state’s new voting machines to hand-marked paper ballots amid concerns about ballot secrecy.
The Athens-Clarke County Board of Elections voted 3-2 Tuesday to have voters mark their selections by hand on paper ballots that will be tallied by a scanner for the presidential primary election, board Chair Jesse Evans confirmed to The Associated Press in a statement sent by text message late Tuesday.
The board found it “impracticable to use the new electronic voting system to meet the state and federal legal requirements” that it “protect absolute ballot secrecy while allowing sufficient monitoring of the ballot marking devices in use,” Evans wrote.
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