Reply #54: Only if you define "emergency" as "upon request of any voter at any time"

[Land Shark]

because they are required to be made available upon a voter's request for any reason.

Also, if there's a real meltdown votes will definitely be lost or unreliable for those who have already voted, so no amount of paper ballots as to SUBSEQUENT voters is going to rescue the votes of teh PAST voters. At that point you are simply mollifying the voters and sending them a way happy, fooling them (perhaps even permanently if elections officials try to fake it) into going along with the idea that there has been a valid election after the meltdown.

Possibly there may be a sliver of cases like power outage where votes MIGHT not be lost and emergency ballots could be used in a real emergency. But that's a minority likelihood, IMHO compared to machine crash and malfunction.