Citizens should
demand paper ballot

Editorial in the Bangor Daily News   26 August 2004

About 3 out of 10 votes in the national election this November will be unverifiable, unauditable and unrecountable unless laws similar to Maine's Act To Assure the Accurate Counting of Votes are adopted by other states. Maine's act bans Internet voting, networked voting machines and any electronic voting machines that don't provide a voter-verifiable paper trail.

Florida's Division of Elections, by comparison, refuses to provide any assurance of accuracy of its elections. It passed a ruling which actually prevents counties that use touchscreen voting machines from conducting manual recounts from the machines (BDN, July 28). This ruling is under appeal before Administrative Law Judge Susan B. Kirkland. If the ruling stands and questions are raised in the 2004 presidential election, as they were in the 2000 presidential election, there would be no way to verify any votes.

The Division of Elections refused to alter their ruling even though Miami-Dade County officials recently admitted that almost all of the audit records from a disputed 2002 primary had been accidentally destroyed. (CBS News, July 29). Later finding the votes on a CD raises more questions than it answers. (UPI, July 30) All of this casts serious doubt on Florida's desire or ability to run a fair election this fall.

Florida is not the only concern. Many states are planning on computer terminals that do not produce paper ballots. Investigating the Diebold direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems security, computer scientists from Johns Hopkins University and the National Security Agency, working with others, recently issued a report that concluded, "A voter can be deceived into thinking he is voting for one candidate, when, in fact, the software is recording the vote for another candidate." (The Nation, Aug. 4)

Without paper ballots, there's no way to know if votes are counted correctly. Every voting method should produce a paper ballot, so people can verify that their votes will count.

Citizens must insist that a paper ballot is produced, since similar to an ATM receipt, it is the only way to know their votes will be counted. Common Cause and MoveOn are emphasizing election monitoring. A petition insisting on a paper trail is available at http://www.moveon.org/protectourvotes/ People can also volunteer at http://www.verifiedvoting.org/techwatch/ to help reduce the risk that votes will be lost or discounted by electronic machine by monitoring the polls on Election Day. "Annotated Best Practices" from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government's recent symposium can be found at www.ljean.com/files/ABPractices.pdf

Without the assurance that every vote will be counted equally in the 2004 election, what kind of government will we have elected and how could we give it our allegiance?

Joyce Schelling is a resident of Orland.