Why is S.C. rushing electronic voting when optical scanners are best?
BY BRETT BURSEY in the Charleston Post and Courier 04 August 2004

If you are among the 33 percent of South Carolinians who plan to vote on Nov. 2, you assume that your vote will be counted to help determine who runs the schoolhouse, the Statehouse and the White House.

Don't be so sure.

In the 2000 presidential election, more than three of every 100 votes cast in South Carolina were lost. That means up to 48,060 missing votes across the state, more than twice the national average.

In Williamsburg County, more than 14 percent of the voters who colored in circles might as well have stayed home because their votes weren't counted. Citizens of Charleston County should wonder if their electronic vote was one of the 2,690 lost. My own vote could have been one of the 3,322 punch-card votes that were spoiled in Lexington County.

Our problem isn't in our voting systems. They all have embarrassingly high rates of lost votes. Our problem is in not verifying the voters' intentions before they leave the poll. That's where the notion of a voter-verifiable ballot comes in.

The State Election Commission's plan to make your vote count is to use to use our state's $46.5 million federal Help America Vote Act grant to create a statewide computer network to record and count votes. The system must work perfectly all the time, because there will be no voter-verified paper ballot to recount.

Since the voters won't get to verify their votes, this system will continue to lose votes.

HAVA does not require e-voting, but does mandate that the voting system produce a paper record with a manual audit capacity. For the past year, the South Carolina Progressive Network has argued with members of the Election Commission that a growing body of technical studies and practical experience finds that e-voting is not the best choice, but that if they insist on trusting a computer network, it must produce an auditable paper trail.

The irony is that voters are being asked to trust the new computerized voting systems at the same time that the State Law Enforcement Division is investigating the process being used to acquire them.

The State Election Commission does not have the authority to decide what voting systems counties choose, and not all counties are sold on the system it is proposing. On July 28, the Sumter County Election Commission told the State Election Commission that it would not participate in the rush to buy, certify, install and train workers on the ES&S machines before the November election. Director of the Sumter County Election Commission Pat Jefferson said, "If this money is for the counties, the counties should get to decide what system we want."

According to voting rights advocates across the country, the most reliable and least expensive method to meet the HAVA requirements for accessibility and verifiability is precinct-based optical scanners (the current optical scan system uses a scanner in the county seat after the polls close). The optical scan ballot is marked by the voter either using a pencil or a touch screen. The ballot is then deposited in the scanner by the voter and refused if there is a problem with the ballot, giving the voter an opportunity to correct any mistakes.

The voter-verified paper ballot is then ped into a box at the poll to be used in the event a recount is required. The receipt doesn't leave the polling place, and won't encourage vote-buying, an argument some critics are making.

There is also an argument that paper ballots would take too much of the voters' time. Really? We wait for the receipt for our ATM withdrawal, or at the grocery store register. Surely citizens will take a few moments to make sure that their vote counts.

Finally, concerns have been raised about protecting the voting rights of the disabled. Truth is, the same voice system that enables visually impaired voters to cast a private vote using headphones is available with lower-tech, less vulnerable systems than e-voting.

The bottom line is that the State Election Commission is rushing to buy and implement a computer network voting system that doesn't produce a paper ballot all while the debate rages about their reliability and the commission procuring them is under an ethics investigation.

While legislation is pending to require a paper trail, South Carolina is preparing to spend all of our grant money on a system that won't.

Everyone who believes that their vote is just as important as their ATM withdrawal should tell their county election commission and their legislative delegation that the plan to route our democracy through a modem is unacceptable.

Computers crash. Our votes don't have to.