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SARASOTA (CBS4) ― When you go to the polls next week for Florida's primary, it'll be the last time you use those highly touted touch-screen voting machines.

After less than six years, the state is pulling the plug on most of its 25,000 touch-screen voting machines, once heralded as a way to prevent messy, embarrassing elections.

Instead, the technology proved expensive for the 15 counties that adopted it after the 2000 presidential election thrust Florida into the national spotlight for the pregnant, hanging and dimpled chads on its paper ballots.

Officials promise the new method will be better. Most voters will fill in ovals on a paper ballot and a scanner will verify their vote before they leave the precinct.

Sarasota voters were the first to reject electronic voting, and it's the first of the touch-screen counties to make the switch. The first major test of new system will be during Tuesday's presidential primary election.

Other counties will use the new system beginning in August, giving them roughly six months to make the transition.

Even if it wanted to, Sarasota couldn't use its touch-screen machines. The county's 1,590 machines, purchased for $4.7 million, remain under lock and key while federal investigators probe whether they failed to record 18,000 votes during a 2006 congressional election.

"I still think they're a good system," Sarasota Elections Supervisor Kathy Dent said. "But voter confidence is important."

She acknowledged that a lot is riding on the optical-scan machines working as planned -- Florida is running out of voting systems to try. "The optical scan is the only thing left short of rocks in a bucket," Dent joked.

In the lobby of her office, Dent keeps a mini-museum of the different ways Sarasota voters have elected their leaders. Three of the systems, punch cards, touch-screens and optical scanners, have all been employed in the last eight years.

Most of the state's 67 counties chose to use optical scanners to count paper ballots after the 2000 election. But the counties making the switch back to paper ballots this year are home to 5.5 million registered voters, roughly half the state's total.

The rollout of the machines during a presidential election year, typically the busiest time for election officials, is causing some strain for supervisors who must worry about where to store and secure thousands of ballots.

Florida elections are "going back in technology 30 years," said Kay Klem, Indian River County's supervisor of elections.

Ditching the touch-screens is also tough for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning, who as Pasco County's elections chief was a vocal advocate for touch screens.

"It's somewhat disconcerting to know that a system I know is accurate, is reliable, is secure, is going to be put on the shelf and never used again," he said.

Still, the change is widely seen as a good thing by elections officials and voting activists who have lambasted touch screens for their lack of a verifiable paper trail.

"They're not reliable and they're expensive," said Kitty Garber, research director of the Florida Fair Elections Center.

Sarasota's machines are paid for, but some counties, including Palm Beach, owe millions for their touch-screens. Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million. Statewide, the debt is estimated at $32 million, said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for Browning.

Florida officials must also figure out how to get rid of the machines, some plan to sell or recycle them. Counties will keep some of the machines for disabled voters until 2010. After that, they'll be completely banned.

Don't expect to find the touch-screen machines on eBay or Craigslist, the way some memorabilia from the botched 2000 election ended up online.

Browning said that since other states are still using the technology, the machines can't become collector's items.

He predicted few problems with the new paper ballots.

"If you've taken a standardized test or you've filled out a lottery ticket, you've got the concept," Browning said.

While no one's predicting problems like the 2000 presidential election, which left Florida's votes undecided for more than month, no one's overestimating Florida's voters.

"I don't think we can take for granted that people know how to mark the ballot," Browning said. A smooth transition is going to hinge on how well local supervisors inform voters of the changes, he said.

Voters just seem to just want a system that works.

"As long as all my votes are counted, I don't mind it," Tampa hotel worker Liona Coats said after voting early in the Democratic presidential primary.

But just as campaigns seem to stretch on forever, elections officials' work never seems to be done. Browning's office now has to get lawmakers' approval for manual recounts -- just in case 2008 turns out to be a lot like 2000.

(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)