Arkansas is finally buying new electronic voting systems. The previous ones were purchased in 2006.
They are buying from good old, trustworthy, time-honored ES&S. They are buying, to the tune of millions with some help from the feds, updated touchscreen machines that let you select the candidates you want and then--miraculously--spit out a paper ticket to insert into a second piece of machinery (inefficient and raises the cost) that contains your choices along with a barcode, which is what the machinery counts. Barcodes are like toys to geeks, with any number of temperable possibilities. So when DHS made paper trails mandatory, this is what we get. There's a better model out there selling well too, the digital scanner, which is the one that should be going viral.