DENVER  A plan to use only paper ballots in Colorado in this November’s election, which was announced with bipartisan hoopla in January to replace the state’s troubled electronic voting machine system, died quietly in a state legislature committee room on Thursday.

Opponents of the plan said it was no longer needed, because what was broken then is now fixed. But supporters said that questions of reliability and security of the electronic voting and vote-counting machines remained unresolved, and could yet resurface before November.

The debate exploded in December, when Colorado’s secretary of state, Mike Coffman, a Republican, announced that voting machines used all over the state, including in many of the most populous counties, had failed tests by his office.

The proposed solution of using paper ballots faced immediate and stiff opposition from county clerks, who administer the elections and who said the logistics of a one-year transformation were insurmountable.