N.H. Among Few Using Paper in Vote Records
RACHEL KONRAD
Associated Press

The technology troubles that could bedevil elections this year in California, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere were absent in New Hampshire this week. That's because it is among the few states that require a paper record for every ballot cast.

New Hampshire's relatively low-tech system - adopted after disasters with both antiquated punch cards and touch-screen computers - could become a nationwide model as scrutiny over electronic voting grows.

"Maybe people elsewhere trust machines more than they trust humans, but that would be totally out of the question here," said Secretary of State Bill Gardner, one of the longest-serving elections officials in the country. "I'm aghast that other places are considering touch-screen computers."

In 1995, New Hampshire passed a law requiring a paper record of every ballot cast, effectively banning touch-screen election computers that don't produce such receipts. Instead, New Hampshire voters fill in ovals or connect arrows on paper ballots or card stock.

Nationwide, though, more than 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals are being used, and the Pentagon also is going paperless - military authorities announced last week that up to 100,000 Americans living overseas will vote over the Internet in November.

About 5,500 people, mostly computer scientists and voting rights advocates, have put their names to an online petition warning federal authorities that voting systems lacking paper records are "inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering."

Gardner, a Democrat first elected in 1976, is the only secretary of state to sign the petition, which was created by Stanford University computer scientist David Dill.

"New Hampshire may not be perfect," Dill said. "But if every state were as good as New Hampshire, we'd be pretty confident in our elections, and the computer scientists might not be so up in arms."

Many states, including Maryland, Florida and Georgia, are installing touch-screen systems to qualify for millions in matching funds from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, aimed at eliminating the dangling chad confusion in Florida's 2000 presidential election. In California, nearly 1 in 10 voters cast ballots on paperless touch-screens in a gubernatorial recall election in October.

The dangers to democracy are clear, computer scientists and voter security advocates say - hackers, power failures, downed phone lines, even conspiracies to alter the vote by insiders at equipment vendors.

And since most touch-screen terminals lack traditional printers and don't produce paper records for every vote cast, thorough recounts are impossible.

In Keene, N.H., Larry Phillips, 57, said he had no doubts that workers at his local recreation center counted his vote for Howard Dean properly in Tuesday's primary.

"I have confidence in the process, in the fact that I know the people when I walk into the polling place, and ultimately in the little machine the ballot is fed into," said Phillips, a psychologist. "Maybe New Hampshire is an anomaly, but I'd suspect people would want the same confidence wherever they are in any system they're using."

Slightly more than half the 282,000 ballots from the state's Democratic and Republican primaries are counted by optical scan machines, similar to the method used for SAT exams. Poll workers hand count about 45 percent of the votes, and all the ballots are then stored in county lock boxes in case of a recount.

"There's no hemming and hawing, or saying the computer ate the ballots," said Leo Pepino, 77, a state representative from Manchester. Pepino introduced the paper trail bill in 1994, after paperless Shouptronic computers in the state's largest city couldn't perform traditional recounts and a local computer programmer said the machines were flawed.

Although New Hampshire's last primary recount was in the 1980s, about 1 in 4 elections statewide are recounted each year. Poll workers say the process usually takes only a few days.

"People in other states talk about the unbelievable burden of recounts," said Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant secretary of state. "They don't realize the cost of restoring legitimacy is far greater than the cost of maintaining it."

ON THE NET

David Dill's petition: http://verifiedvoting.org