Official: Voting will leave paper trail

By Michael Wright
The Facts

Published March 28, 2004

Amid growing concerns that electronic voting is fundamentally flawed, Brazoria County commissioners promise to take a hard look at the new systems before they buy one.

Federal law requires punch-card ballots to be replaced with electronic machines by 2006. However, some worry that recounts will be impossible because most new machines don?t have a paper trail. They also worry that computer systems will be vulnerable to hackers who could votes the way they do a misspelled word.

Problems already have crept up in Florida over new voting machines, four years after the state threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In San Diego County, California, software problems with new machines forced 36 percent of the precincts to open late in the March 2 California primary, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Reports from Ohio?s secretary of state and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., have concluded that some of the leading machines on the market are vulnerable to tampering.

Among other things, the Johns Hopkins study said the ATM-like card given to each voter in Georgia to place in the touch-screen machine is vulnerable to counterfeiting and could be used to cast multiple ballots, according to a report from The Associated Press.

All this has worried some active in Brazoria County politics.

Mary Ruth Rhodenbaugh asked Brazoria County commissioners to make sure the machines they buy have a paper backup that will allow the county to do a recount. Rhodenbaugh said she is concerned the two systems the county currently is considering don?t leave a paper trail.

?Large corporate interests have invested huge sums of money in the research,? Rhodenbaugh said at Tuesday?s Commissioners Court meeting. ?There are at least three paper-audit systems on the market today.?
Michelle Schafer, a spokeswoman for Hart Intercivic, which makes one of the systems county commissioners are considering, has said their machines keep an electronic record that can be used for a recount. However, the machines don?t meet guidelines Congress is considering implementing.
Brazoria County Judge John Willy said he?s been concerned about the paper trail and said the county will consider options other than the touch-screen and rotary systems for which commissioners currently have bids.
?The ones that have bid do not have a paper record,? Willy said. ?We have asked them to research what it would take insofar as adapting those to create a paper trail.?
If that doesn?t work, Willy said, the county will consider optical scanning, which any one who has taken a standardized test in school will recognize. Voters fill in circles to mark their ballots, which are scanned for the results.
Rhodenbaugh urged commissioners to consider machines that produce a receipt for the voter.
Before the computer sends the ballot, it would print a paper slip the voter can review to make sure the choices are correct. After the voter transmits his ballot, the receipt is stored so it?s available if a recount is needed.
Other systems would give voters access cards and they could access their ballots on-line using encrypted information, according to reports
in Newsweek.
Congress is considering legislation requiring paper audits, but the two bills are stuck in Senate and House committees.
Willy said the county needs to know what the federal government is going to do before it spends $2 million on new voting machines.
?The federal government will ultimately control how those machines will be designed,? Willy said. ?They have not set the specs of the paper trail for the currently used machines.?
County officials will meet next week with officials from Hart Intercivic and Electronic Systems and Software, which is the county?s other bidder.