Diebold apparently shopping for printers at Defense Contractor World: Last Wednesday, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bob Graham announced a bill that calls for touch-screen machines to produce a paper record of voters' ballots by November. At the time, voting systems vendors, who would have us undertake the upcoming presidential election without an audit mechanism to recount contested votes, said this was impossible. Adding printers to these systems, assuming it was even technologically possible under such a tight deadline, would be far too costly. Indeed, Diebold said that the cost of adding printers to its machines would run about $500+ per (a bit steep for a simple printer, but quite in keeping with Diebold's policy of charging states "out the yin-yang" for any after-sale modifications to its machines). Thing is, Diebold doesn't need to add printers to its machines. They already have them. "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," Georgia poll worker Jed Rothwell wrote in an e-mail published by PBS columnist Robert Cringely. "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."