No reason to delay buying new voting machines

 

OUR STATE IS IN danger of disenfranchising thousands of voters, not to mention squandering millions of dollars we can’t afford to waste. All in the name of protecting against election fraud.

Critics are playing Chicken Little and attempting to undermine public confidence and throw up procedural barriers to a plan to replace unreliable voting machines with state-of-the-art equipment.

But the sky is not falling. The electronic voting machines the State Election Commission is preparing to buy are less likely to be tampered with than many of the systems we currently use. And they will replace voting machines that have intolerably high error rates.

Most of the criticism grows out of an Internet-based movement of paranoia that has picked up steam since the California secretary of state said several counties in that state couldn’t use their electronic voting machines this fall because they were susceptible to fraud, and demanded that within two years all electronic voting machines include a paper record that voters can verify. (The other criticism in South Carolina, about alleged improprieties in the way the voting machine contract was awarded, is so trumped-up and ridiculous as to be unworthy of serious comment.)

There is no good reason for voters who use electronic voting machines to cast two ballots — one electronically and another a printed receipt physically cast into a ballot box. Such a process would be unnecessarily expensive and, given that most electronic systems can’t yet pull it off, an unnecessary delay, providing a level of verification never before demanded of any voting system. Worse, the idea is ripe for abuse by voters sent in by candidates to falsely claim discrepancies, causing lines to grow longer — and thus driving away frustrated would-be voters — as officials try to correct a problem that doesn’t exist. The suggested alternative — reverting to an all-paper system — reflects an unjustified and embarrassing Luddite mentality that runs counter to our entire society’s embrace of the computer age.

The idea behind printed receipts is built on a faulty notion that undermines public confidence in the election system: that new electronic voting machines are likely to be manipulated, and that the only way voters can make sure their vote is counted is with a paper document. In fact, the machines our state plans to buy have more safeguards than the electronic voting machines already used by nearly half the voters in the state, including those in Richland County. Not only do the machines have three memory banks, but they copy each individual ballot, so officials could print the ballots and count them by hand if needed. And contrary to popular belief, the system is never connected to the Internet, so it’s not subject to Internet hackers.

Requiring these unnecessary bells and whistles would make it impossible to buy new voting equipment in time for the fall elections, and that would cost the state $2.2 million in federal funds. Worse, it would disenfranchise voters: In 2000, no presidential vote was counted on 49,000 S.C. ballots. In many cases, people simply didn’t vote; but the rate of no-votes was so much higher on optical-scan and punch-card systems than on electronic systems as to strongly indicate that those outdated systems cost 15,000 South Carolinians their right to have their votes counted. Since we know that, and have the ability to correct it, it would be immoral to refuse to act in time for the fall elections.