Miami-Dade County's $24.5 million experiment in touch-screen voting is over -- but payments for 7,250 soon-to-be banned machines are not. Local taxpayers still owe $14 million for the devices, with payments that stretch out over the next five years.

Broward County still owes $8 million for its 6,040 machines, said Marci Gelman, assistant director of the Broward Office of Management and Budget.

'RIGHT DIRECTION'

"It's a tough decision, " Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Lester Sola said of the plan to scrap the electronic system. "But I think it's a step in the right direction."

Responding to some voters' fears that the ATM-style touch-screen machines are unreliable because they don't leave a hard paper trail, the Florida Legislature voted Thursday to abandon them and revert to paper ballots.

Federal money will cover most of the estimated $6 million it will cost Miami-Dade to buy optical scanners to count the paper ballots, and the switch could save up to $1 million per election in administrative costs, Sola said. But the fate of the county's pricey collection of touch-screen machines remains unclear.

The secretary of state will collect them. If they can be sold, some of the money could be used to help pay the county's debt, Sola said. But he is not optimistic.

Judi Spann, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Kurt Browning, said her agency isn't sure what they will do with the machines. "What is the market for used touch screens?" she asked. "Should we put them on eBay?"

Under the new law, touch screens now in use must be out of service by summer 2008.

Some equipped with audio features to help the visually impaired will remain until 2012.

Despite the cost, elections officials and paper-ballot proponents hailed Thursday's vote as a victory.

Gov. Charlie Crist, who championed the switch and has promised to sign the bill, said he doesn't want the state to be embarrassed again by a disputed election.

"This is a great day for Floridians, " Crist said. "We will now have much better and much greater integrity in our voting systems."

RESTORING CONFIDENCE

Sola and Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes agreed the change is worthwhile if it bolsters voter confidence.

"Touch screens worked fine, " Snipes said. "As far as I know, we never had a major problem. However, people had questions about them. I think this move is a good one."

Thursday marks the second time in the past decade that Florida officials decided to make major changes to their election procedures.

Following the trauma of the hanging chads in the 2000 presidential election, which George Bush won by 537 votes, the state banned punch-card voting machines. Most counties shifted to paper ballots read by optical scanners, which use ballots that look like the fill-in-the-dot standardized tests most voters remember from high school.

But 15 counties, including Miami-Dade and Broward, opted for the much costlier touch-screen machines, which record votes in an electronic database, not on paper.

That has led to suspicions, especially in close elections, that the machines malfunctioned or were somehow rigged to benefit the winner. With no paper to re-examine, the only recount procedure is to query the computer's database again. For skeptics that's about as reassuring as double-checking a stopped clock.

Last fall, electronic machines in Sarasota County registered 18,000 non-votes in the U.S. House race to replace Katherine Harris. All the disputed ballots did, however, record a vote for U.S. Senate, which appeared immediately before the House race, and for governor, which came just after.

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