Donna McAvoy no longer needs to bother with food stamps when she visits the local supermarket. No one watches her count out the paper vouchers at the checkout. No one casts judgment on the items she is purchasing.

Now McAvoy, who recently moved to Caribou with her three children, simply loads her groceries onto the conveyor belt and slides a plastic card through the machine at the checkout. Only she and the cashier know the difference.

“It’s easy,” she said. “For people that were embarrassed to use the food stamps, it is better.”

McAvoy is one of thousands of Maine residents now using an electronic benefit transfer card to buy groceries with food stamps. It has been more than a year since the state began issuing the cards to replace the paper coupons, and the Department of Human Services says the new system is quicker, safer and less stigmatizing for participants.

“They swipe their cards and that’s it,” said Rick Morrow, food stamps program manager for the department’s Bureau of Family Independence. “The stigma is certainly gone.”

Maine was one of the last states to switch to the new EBT system, which is now required by federal law. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 required all states to issue Food Stamp benefits electronically as of October 2002. In Maine, it started as a pilot program in April and May 2003 for York and Cumberland counties and went statewide in June 2003.

EBT cards work like debit cards. Recipients have personal identification numbers that work like electronic signatures and allow them to access their funds, either as food stamps or cash or both, depending upon what type of benefits they receive. Morrow said there is more privacy with the cards and no chance that they’ll be lost or stolen in the mail, as was sometimes the case with paper coupons.

Designed to help low- and middle-income families buy food, the federal food stamp program covers any items for human consumption. It does not apply to things like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, alcohol, tobacco or pet food.

Recipients must meet certain eligibility requirements. For example, a family of four can earn a monthly income of $2,043 before taxes to receive food stamps. That, Morrow said, means many working families in Maine are receiving assistance.

The number of families in the program has been on the rise in recent years. Last August, 71,517 Maine households received food stamps. That figure is up 8.9 percent over August 2003 and 25.2 percent over August 2002.

State officials attribute the increase to a struggling economy and a more thorough computer system that scans potential recipients for food stamp benefits.

Besides food stamps, EBT cards are used to distribute public cash assistance, which the state calls Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. In August, 13,363 families received TANF.

About 1,200 of them had the funds deposited directly into their personal bank accounts instead of their electronic benefit accounts.

Mike O’Connor, manager of the EBT program at the Department of Human Services, said the transition to the new cards was smooth. “Things went better than I ever imagined,” he said.

The initial cost of the EBT program was about $787,000 to cover the expense of issuing the cards, training people to use them, printing literature about the system and programming its administration, O’Connor said. State and federal government shared the bill.

Cards may be easier than paper vouchers, but they are also more expensive. Before, it cost $1.70 in postage, supplies and labor to mail each packet of food stamps to a recipient. Now, the contractor for the card system charges $2.18 to electronically deposit the benefits into each person’s account each month. The difference is 48 cents per household.

Daren Hachey, president of the Maine Grocers Association, said the EBT system is working fine in his store, Mr. Market in Winthrop. The new cards operate on the same equipment that customers were using for debit cards and there are no paper coupons for clerks to count, handle and separate at the end of the day.

“From my perspective, it works well,” he said.

McAvoy said she uses her card at places like Shop ‘n Save, Wal-Mart and Irving with no problems but is disappointed that other places, like Tim Hortons and Dunkin’ Donuts, don’t accept the cards.

The rules for what you can buy with food stamps and where you can buy it are too arbitrary, she said.

“It irritates me that I can’t buy a cup of coffee,” she said. “I can buy candy bars but not coffee. I can buy a ham sandwich but not a meatball sub.”

Others, like Mary Eastman of Brewer, are concerned that people who receive public assistance have too much freedom regarding what they buy. She often sees people who use their EBT cards to buy lottery tickets and rent movies, which she considers to be a waste of state funds. The government, she said, should find a way to prevent it.

“If I can’t afford to buy a Powerball [ticket], why should the state pay for it?” she said. “It is a computer system. Isn’t there some kind of lock that would prevent them from putting this on their card?”

Newell Augur, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services, said there are federal rules regulating what people may buy with food stamps but none for TANF, the public cash assistance program. If the state came up with such a control, the federal government probably wouldn’t support it, he said.

“It’s cash assistance,” he said. “The federal government does not require that there be limits on how they can spend that money. That is the client’s money to spend as they see fit.”

That, Morrow said, is an issue of freedom of choice. “Our clients are still human beings who are free to choose to do with their [benefits] what they wish,” he said.

Human Services officials are considering how other benefits, like daycare or child support, could be connected to EBT cards, as has been done in other states. But for now, state administrators say they are happy with the way the program is running.

“The program has been very, very good,” O’Connor said. “The system really is working great.”