Paper trail voting quest concerns Darnell
By Judith R. Tackett, jtackett@nashvillecitypaper.com
March 10, 2004
 
Secretary of State Riley C. Darnell is concerned about a national quest to reinstate paper trails on voting machines which could interfere with his goal to replace punch card and lever voting machines with electronic equipment.

Several bills have been filed in Congress and in the General Assembly that could require voter verified paper trail systems.

“It’s kind of like going back in time,” Darnell said. “All these years we have tried to get away from paper ballots, and now here we are saying that the official ballot may be a paper ballot.”

Darnell said he hopes state legislators won’t pass a pending bill requiring paper ballots in Tennessee because the state would have to determine whether the right equipment was available and whether it works.

“The last thing you want is to have a paper jam in the middle of election where you can’t get to vote because the machine is broken,” he said.

The change in requirements could come at a time when Tennessee has received more than $54 million in federal funding to voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which bans all punch card and lever voting machines.

State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson said the Secretary of State Department will have to make a decision which kind of system to use by the middle of this year because of the 2006 HAVA deadline.

One option for Tennessee was to use a precinct based optional scan system.

“That’s when a voter has a piece of paper, they fill it in and then it gets read by a scanner,” Thompson said. “I think if paper trail is required that would be preferable to the voter verified paper trail.”