County commissioners decided today to buy new optical-scan ballot counters and rejected a proposal for 13 additional touch-screen voting machines.

The decision led to applause from verified voting activists, who had questioned the touch-screen machines’ reliability.

Like other North Carolina counties, Wake’s machines were decertified last year based on new state and federal standards. The county must buy all new machines in time for the May 2 primary.

Last week, the county’s Board of Elections requested that commissioners approve using optical-scan ballots on Election Day and touch-screen machines for early voting.

They were concerned that hand-sorting the paper ballots from early voting would be cumbersome and could lead to security problems. Touch- screen machines would sort the results automatically.

The touch-screen machines, which are similar to an ATM, are used in Mecklenburg and Guilford counties, but have never been tried in Wake.

Voting activists argued that the touch-screen machines would be more expensive and less reliable. They said the machines’ thermal paper trail would not withstand the rigors of a recount.

“Why spend extra money for a dubious and experimental technology?” said Andrew Silver, 64, a Cary epidemiologist.

Commissioner Phil Jeffreys, a retired postal worker, said he was not concerned about the difficult of hand-sorting an estimated 90,000 ballots after next fall’s Election Day.

“I worked in a post office for 30 years and it’s not a lot (to sort),” he said.

County commissioners unanimously rejected the proposal and approved a second request from the elections board to request all optical-scan ballot counters.

John Gilbert, chairman of the elections board, said that hand- counting would be a temporary solution. He predicted that the county’s vendor would eventually improve its ballot-counting machines, making hand-sorting unnecessary.

If not, he said the county can always switch to touch-screen machines later.