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DAVIS COUNTY -- A number of Weber and Davis County communities are ditching the computers on election day in order to save cash.
Only five of Davis County's 15 cities are planning to use electronic voting machines in the September and November elections. In Weber County, only three cities plan to use the machines.
Everywhere else, elections and city leaders have chosen to go with paper ballots in order to save money. In Ogden's case, the savings could be as much as $40,000.
Even though Ogden is using paper ballots, the counting will still be done by machine. Ogden City Recorder Cindi Mansell says that's also to save money.
"For me, I would have had to hire twice as many judges, those to run the polls and those to count, so it really didn't work out to be any more economically feasible," she explained.
But at a cost of around $100,000 to use electronic voting machines versus $60,000 to use optical scan paper ballots, she says the choice was a no-brainer. She'd prefer to use the machines, but in the current economy, it didn't make sense.
All of the cities will go back to electronic voting in 2010, because of disability act requirements in county-wide and state-wide elections for access to machines.
E-mail: bbruce@ksl.com
