At Tuesday’s Wetzel County Commission meeting Denzil Sloan of Reader met with the commission to discuss current voting systems-particularly raising support for doing away with electronic voting machines and bringing back paper ballots.

Sloan presented a report of Project Everest-a study on electronic voting machines by the Ohio Secretary of State.

The 99-page report summarizes tests that were done to see how many ways the machines could be tampered with, resulting in inaccurate votes. The study concluded that as-is, the machines can be too easily hacked into and therefore should be reconsidered as a method for counting votes. Furthermore, according to Sloan, the state of Ohio has discarded the electronic voting machines and replaced them with paper ballots because of this report.

The commission decided to take Sloan’s request into consideration and conduct further research before making a decision on the matter.