WASHINGTON — Arlington County is eyeing new state-of-the art voting machines. Like other localities in Virginia, the county has to get rid of its newer touchscreen machines since they do not provide a paper trail.
But the county is looking at dumping all of its current voting machines, reports InsideNoVa.com.
Currently, Arlington has different types of machines including the newer touchscreen machines which have to be replaced.
Fairfax County has already made the jump. It has replaced its an entire fleet of voting machines with the new digital scan machines. And the machines have already been used during the 2014 mid-term elections.
The way these new digital scan machines work is that a person fills out a paper ballot which is then fed into the digital reader scan machine and their vote is recorded.
Arlington Electoral Board Chair Charlene Bickford says board members do want to move ahead even though they’re not sure where the $1 million will come from to pay for the new voting machines.
“We have to switch to a completely new system before the next presidential election,” she says.
Arlington County voters could be test driving different types of new digital scan voting machines by this April or May.
