Electronic voters to get paper printouts by '06

By Matthew Rodriguez
Seattle Times staff reporter
Electronic voting machines in Washington state will be required to show voters a paper trail by 2006, Secretary of State Sam Reed said yesterday.

Electronic voting machines, such as touch-screen monitors used in Snohomish County, will be randomly tested before, on and after election days this fall.

"Electronic voting is really customer-friendly, and that's one of the advantages of it," Reed said. "We have to make sure people trust this equipment."

Touch-screen voting machines allow voters to choose by touching a pen to a computer screen. The machines have been criticized by some watchdog groups because they do not produce paper ballots that voters can see to verify that their vote registered correctly.

Reed said the timing was not right for a paper-trail system to be put in place by the fall.

Instead, election officials will have a system of testing electronic machines for integrity, ing a few at random on election days to ensure there are no problems with their software.

"We're already into the election cycle here," Reed said. "What we're doing ... [is] parallel testing of Snohomish County equipment before, during and after the election. And we're feeling confident that this is going to be enough to verify that this equipment is operating properly."

Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger said it will cost an estimated $500,000 to retrofit the county's 1,000 electronic voting machines with paper-trail systems by 2006. About $82,500 will be provided by the federal government, and the county will pick up the rest, Terwilliger said.

Touch-screen voting machines can produce a paper record of a ballot after an election, but the planned retrofitting will allow a voter to see a printout before he or she leaves the precinct. Snohomish County has used electronic voting machines since 2002.

Sean Greene, research director for electionline.org, a nonpartisan Web site about election reform, said Nevada will use so-called "voter-verified paper audit trail" systems this fall, and that California and Ohio plan to use them in 2006, along with Washington state.