January 30th, 2015 by WCBC Radio
Maryland voters will return to casting ballots on paper starting with the presidential election in 2016, election officials said Thursday, adding it to the long list of states that use paper ballots or a blend of paper and digital formats.
WBAL reports that on Thursday, state lawmakers were given a sneak peek of the new paper voting machines that will be set up in polling centers for the 2016 election. Officials also briefed the legislators on lessons learned from the last election in November. The state has used digital voting machines for the past decade. "We're going to have a million more voters in 2016, although we've made some changes this additional volume is going to put stress on the administration of elections," said John Willis, principal investigator for the University of Baltimore's Schaefer Center for Public Policy. Wills, whose center studied the 2014 Maryland election for state officials and helped provide the briefing, added: "We need to prepare for that." According to the center's study, about 1.7 million registered voters participated in the 2014 election.
The Maryland Board of Elections' state administrator, Linda Lamone, said the coming year will be spent preparing polling center volunteers and educating voters.
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