Voting in the electronic booth: Your secret is safe

By Sam Reed
If you're fortunate enough to live without a disability, you've voted your entire life secretly and independently. You've laid your ballot out on the kitchen table, cast your vote for America's president and ped it in the mail. You've voted at a poll site alone without help. No poll worker saw your choice for governor. Not one of your neighbors knew if you approved that initiative.

But not everyone is as lucky.

Come Election Day, the blind rely on a family member or friend in order to cast their votes. Someone else must guide them through every step of the ballot, and their candidate ions and beliefs are revealed.

For the first time ever, electronic voting has made it possible for those with disabilities to cast a secret ballot. In fact, this new technology is a federal mandate and must be offered at every poll site in the country by 2006 ("Electronic voters to get paper printouts by '06," Times, Local News, July 8).

But as new technology often does, electronic voting has invited one healthy national debate. The issue has surfaced in every state in the nation, in everything from community newspapers to fashion magazines. The result is a lack of public trust. And as history has shown us well, democracy is nothing without public trust.

We in the state of Washington have a responsibility to meet this federal mandate, but to do so cautiously. That's why I'm calling for strict safeguards and security around every electronic voting machine in this state:

First, all electronic voting equipment must include a voter-verifiable paper audit trail by 2006. This paper audit trail is essentially your hard-copy guarantee that your vote has been recorded as you intended.

Immediately, rigorous testing of electronic voting machines will begin before, during and after Election Day. Machines will be randomly ed (for testing), to prove no one has tampered in any way with the program code.

However advanced the technology, elections are secure because of the people who run them. Poll-worker training, and the training of all election administrators, must be held to the highest standard. We must develop an intensive curriculum on the new equipment that includes recognizing signs of suspicious behavior.

No electronic voting machines may be networked or connected to the Internet. Machines must stand alone so that no one may hack into them.

These safeguards are critical to the voting process in our state.

While all citizens must be guaranteed the right to vote a secret ballot, without public trust, democracy itself will fail.