Touch screen voting on Tuesday

Greene County Clerk Richard Struckhoff announced five precincts will have touch screen voting machines on Tuesday.

Struckhoff is enlisting the help of fellow county clerks to help voters and to pick up some experience with the machines themselves. The machines are meant for voters with disabilities, but if you normally vote at one of these locations and want to try it out you may. The touch screen machines will be at the following precincts:
- Christ United Methodist Church (35-B)
- Courthouse Rotunda (20-AB)
- Hillcrest Presbyterian Church (29-B)
- Hickory Hills School (11/31-C)
- Sunset Church of Christ (34-AC)

These machines are mandated by the Help America Vote Act, the fallout from the recount of 2000 to improve the accuracy and legitimacy of voting in the U.S. Of course, there is the law of unintendend consequences at play too. Consider Arkansas' recent voting problems:

Ann Clements, spokesman for the Arkansas secretary of state’s office, said many of the problems stemmed from election workers’ unfamiliarity with new electronic voting machines.
Touch-screen voting debuted statewide Tuesday, allowing Arkansas residents to vote electronically.
In some cases, poll workers couldn’t get the electronic machines running when the polls opened, so voters cast traditional paper ballots instead.
The merging of the new touchscreen technology with older optical scanners that read paper ballots wasn’t smooth in every case.
“We expected there to be issues from the first-time use of new technology,” Clements said. “The marrying of the new and old systems usually takes some adjustment. We just appreciate all the hard work and diligence by the counties across the state.”

Struckhoff says touch screen machines will be at every polling place in August for the state and county primary elections.