Another reason they switched to the card is that folks were trading their food stamps for booze and drugs. The EBT creates a record, kinda like your credit card statement, that makes fraud easier to detect. I remember when I went to college in the late 70s, some of the less scrupulous students would go hang out in front of grocery stores in seedier neighborhoods with beer and score $75 worth of food stamps for maybe $5 worth of beer.
I would call them enterprising. A fool and his food stamps are soon parted.