Maryland faces two choices this session. Purchasing new touch screens with printers added, or purchasing optical scan machines to count voter filled out paper ballots.
The touch screen (at 5 to 8 times the cost) machines
produce continuous rolls of thermally-printed paper. They are difficult to
load, difficult to handle after they are removed from the machines and
extremely difficult to read and tally. They bear almost no relationship to
the ordinary individual paper ballots of the past.

All of us need to understand this distinction, because there's a strong
likelihood that the State Administrator of Elections (probably supported by
the Governor's transition elections team, which is chaired by an outspoken
DRE advocate,) will try to "compromise" with the verified voting community
in Maryland by suggesting that we trade in our present, printerless Diebold
DRE machines for Diebold TSx DRE machines. These DRE machines do offer a
printed record, just not one that anyone can use effectively for the reasons
stated above. Moreover, this "compromise" would still leave the Diebold
company and its secret computer programs as the primary vote-counter. In
other words, we would still be in the position of having outsourced our
elections to a private company. Hand-count audits of randomly-selected
precincts would be nearly impossible with these "adding-machine" continuous
rolls of paper.

So we must urge our legislators to approve only voter-marked, individual paper ballots, optically-scanned in each precinct;
and mandatory randomly-selected, hand-counted precinct audits. DREs with
thermal-paper adding-machine rolls (that most voters will simply ignore)
don't begin to fill the bill and must be resisted.

It is up to us to contact our legislators in Annapolis. The moment to do that is now. Remember that 2008 could see a "surprising" turn to Republicans if we do not get rid of machines that do the actual voting for us. We need to do the actual voting ourselves.