Ok, my wife gets the gold for finding this one and forcing me to read it. This is an article by Robert S. Cringely from March that asserts Diebold machines have printers. The article also takes the media to task for missing this.
Prints of Darkness A Year Into the E-voting Crisis, Shouldn't We Have Noticed the Printer That's Already Built into Each Diebold Voting Machine?
Now, how could Diebold have failed to mention that? Each machine is required to print a paper tally at the end of the day. It's got lots of paper. It's just that Diebold wants $535 bucks a machine to make the change to print out the receipt.
Imagine the cool little grey box around the following text:
"Then this week I heard from reader Jed Rothwell, fresh from a day working the polls as a voting clerk. Jed says in the case of Diebold machines at least, there was a printer inside already.
Jed writes, "Meg Smothers of the League of Women Voters recently said that Georgia has 28,000 voting machines, and it would cost $15 million to retrofit them with printers to produce receipts. That comes to $535 per machine. Yet these machines already have printers. They produce a paper receipt at the end of the day showing the vote tallies. The printers are the kind used in cash registers, and they have large rolls of paper that would easily last through the 12 hours the polls remain open. It takes people about a minute to cast a ballot, so one machine would need to print at most 720 receipts per day. The printer and paper are located on the right side of the machine, under a locked metal cover. It would be a simple matter to fabricate a new metal equipment cover with an outlet above the printer, that would print a receipt for the voter. Based on the retail cost of similar metal computer equipment cases available in any computer store, this should cost approximately $30 per machine, not $500. The programming change would be trivial."
End cute little grey box.
Ok, so WHY aren't we screaming to make these changes?
You should read the artilce. Cringely does a great job of making every one seem foolish for not finding this out before. That was June. This is August, and people are still not talking about it.
Shout it from the mountain tops!