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Commissioners ask staff to cost paper-ballot options amid election-equipment questions
Summary
During discussion of the HAVA grant on June 30, a commissioner asked staff to keep a cost estimate for switching to marked paper ballots and raised community requests for vigilance on elections; technical differences between barcode and QR systems were also explained.
During debate on the HAVA application, one commissioner urged staff to prepare cost estimates for moving to marked paper ballots during the upcoming budget season, saying there is community interest in exploring that option.
The commissioner told the court, "I would ask that you just continue to keep that as a number that we know what the cost would be if we were to move to something like that." Another commissioner explained an executive order affecting barcode-based machines and noted Collin County’s recent move away from barcode-using equipment; the commissioner contrasted that system with Parker County’s scanners, which the elections staff said read printed words rather than barcodes.
Cricket clarified the county’s equipment: the county’s scanner reads words on the ballot and the county’s QR code only encodes precinct and ballot style data, not voter or vote-linking barcodes. Commissioners asked staff to keep cost and feasibility data available for budget deliberations.
