Bill calls for paper record of all votes
By TOM BELL, Portland Press Herald Writer

AUGUSTA — Touch-screen voting machines will be in every Maine precinct in two years, and people who worry about the potential for fraud are pushing for a law to ban machines that don't keep a voter-verified paper trail.

Legislation proposed by Rep. Hannah Pingree, D-North Haven, would require that both voters and municipalities get a paper record of all votes. Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky opposes the bill, preferring instead to wait and see how the debate plays out nationally and whether manufacturers develop a technical solution.

State election officials have agreed to prohibit Internet voting, as well as all voting machines that use the Internet to connect central vote collection computers.

Congress is driving the issue. In response to Florida's 2000 voting debacle, Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act to replace archaic punch-card election systems and generally make polls more accessible nationwide.

The law requires Maine to install at least one electronic voting machine in each of the state's 650 precincts by Jan. 1, 2006. Congress has authorized $20 million for Maine to buy the machines and pay for voter education.

Blind and sight-impaired people can use the machines without assistance. For states with large immigrant populations, the machines can be programmed so that non-English speakers can use them.

But skeptics fear the machines will only produce more problems, such as making recounts less reliable and giving computer hackers a chance to sabotage results.

"This is a pretty common-sense, Maine kind of issue," Pingree said. "People don't always trust computers, and they want their vote to be counted."

Researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University have cited many vulnerabilities in touch-screen technology.

They determined that, among other shortcomings, the computer code in the voting machines made by Diebold Elections Systems, the largest manufacturer, was anything but hacker-proof. An outsider could tamper with the program, and the tampering would be difficult to detect, the researchers found.

Pingree said people who use ATMs expect receipts, and voters who use electronic machines should expect no less. Those paper records would be given to election officials, who would keep them to verify the electronic vote if it is contested.

But Pingree's proposal may create a false sense of security, said John T. Smith, a special assistant to the secretary of state. What if some voters, either by accident or as part of an attempt to create doubt about the election, keep their receipts? he asked. Which tally would count, the electronic tally or the paper tally?

On the federal level, he said, voting machine manufacturers and interest groups like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are working to find a solution.

"Let us follow the debate," Smith said. "We don't know whether any solution is better than the other. We don't want to prematurely a solution that may be worse than what we do now."

The Legislature's Committee on Legal and Veterans' Affairs voted on Tuesday to ask Pingree and the Secretary of State's Office to try to work out an agreement and report back the committee next week.