S.C. Voting to Go Paperless

Editorial in the Myrtle Beach Sun News   07 August 2004

Attorney general sidesteps electronic reliability question

Electronic touch-screen voting machines that make no paper record of votes cast are OK for South Carolina, Attorney General Henry McMaster said this week. But his ruling does little to erase the doubts of many South Carolinians that such voting systems are prone to flaws and manipulation.

That's because the scope of McMaster's opinion, requested last month by an anti-electronic machine group called the S.C. Progressive Network, was narrow and legalistic. The S.C. Election Commission's decision to buy paperless machines manufactured by Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software, McMaster said, meets the guidelines of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.

Congress passed this law in the wake of the 2000 voting debacles in Florida and a handful of other states where President Bush fought former Vice President Al Gore to a virtual draw. The chief defect in the law was Congress' failure to specify that the states using federal money to replace antiquated voting systems - most notoriously, 1960s-era mainframe computer punch-card systems - buy electronic systems that can stand up to a recount.

As we all know, this is important in presidential elections. But it's even more important in state and local elections, where a handful of voters often stand between winners and losers.

The S.C. Progressive Network rightly argues that valid recounts in close elections require a paper trail allowing election officials to examine ballots vote by vote. McMaster effectively ignores that issue in his opinion.

Was there an element of political expediency in McMaster's opinion? The federal law allocates $2 million toward the cost of replacing S.C. voting systems. But if the Election Commission fails to replace punch-card voting systems used in 11 S.C. counties in time for the Nov. 2 election, the state will lose that money. Said loss would force S.C. state and local taxpayers to pay the entire cost of modernizing the voting system in the state's 46 counties. McMaster, we're guessing, wouldn't want to take the blame for that.

None of this is to suggest that the hardware the Election Commission has chosen for South Carolina, to be pioneered in 16 counties Nov. 2, will beget flubbed recounts due to hacking, poll-worker incompetence or software flaws. Perhaps, as Election Commission Chairman John West insisted in a recent letter published in S.C. newspapers, including The Sun News, the ES&S system will work reliably and deliver accurate polling results. Perhaps, as he says, the Progressive Network instigated this fight on behalf of election-machine vendors whose products the commission spurned.

We should all hope West is right. The ES&S system soon will go statewide, replacing the aging first-generation electronic machines used in Horry and Georgetown counties, in time for the next general election cycle. We who soon will be voting locally on the ES&S machines especially have reason to hope the 16-county maiden run comes off successfully and uncontroversially.