Touch-screen voting may create new problems

Other states ought to look at Oregon’s success with voting by mail

August 1, 2004

With only three months remaining until the general election, other states are spending millions to buy touch-screen voting machines. Meanwhile, doubts about the devices multiply, with good reason.

How do voters know that their ballots got recorded? What if hackers change the vote tallies? How do officials conduct a recount if there’s no paper trail?

Unless these questions can be resolved quickly, they will undermine the voting process, the bedrock of our democracy. Citizens must trust that their vote will be recorded accurately. Otherwise, electronic bells and whistles — and major expenditures of taxpayers’ money — are in vain.

This controversy has pretty much passed Oregon by because we already have a successful, low-tech alternative: voting by mail.

Use of a paper ballot, a pencil and a stamp works so well here that you have to wonder why it hasn’t caught on elsewhere.

Voting by mail is convenient. Turnout in Oregon has risen since vote-by-mail began. In case of a recount, the ballots are right there in the county elections office. And an all-mail election costs at least one-third less than one at polling places — not counting the cost of new touch-screen machines.

Yet in their rush to avert a Florida-style elections debacle, elections directors nationwide have stampeded to touch-screen voting machines. Nearly one-third of the nation’s voters will use them in November.

Supposedly, the machines are more accurate than the old punch cards, and they can easily be adapted for disabled voters and those who don’t speak English. However, hardly any of them provide a paper record to use if the election is contested.

John Lindback, Oregon’s elections director, says that officials from other states rarely ask him about vote-by-mail. When they do, they obsess about the potential for fraud. However, that’s rarely a problem here.

County elections clerks check the signature on each ballot against the one given when a voter registered. When the signatures differ, the voter must visit the elections office in person to straighten out the matter. Only then is the ballot counted.

Signing someone else’s name on a ballot is a crime, and officials have successfully prosecuted a few Oregonians for doing so.

Unless Oregonians are inherently more honest than folks elsewhere, there’s no reason that at least some other states can’t vote by mail.

Obviously states can’t pull off such a major change between now and November. Oregonians worked up to all-mail elections for years. If elections directors elsewhere have hitched their stars to touch-screen machines, they’ve got to make that technology work for now.

If that proves impossible — or if November’s election returns are delayed by the electronic equivalent of hanging chads — other states will have to reassess their reliance on the latest high-tech gear.

They can find Oregon in the upper-left-hand corner of their map. We’re the ones with 80 percent general-election turnout and no doubt that the vote you cast gets counted.