Views on the News

Augusta Free Press   21 September 2004

Our View

The push following the 2000 presidential-election fiasco was to find a way to make it so that what took place in Florida with butterfly ballots and hanging and dimpled chads and the like would never happen again.

As the saying goes, Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it ...

Now it seems that we're aware, and painfully so, that the solution that we have come up with to butterflies and chads and the mysterious process of trying to discern voter intent, in the form of e-voting, is no more foolproof than an optical-scan or lever machine might or might not be.

At least with paper and lever machines, there's the possibility of a recount to make things right (as long as the Supreme Court keeps its nose out of what should be a states' rights issue, anyway).

There's no guarantee, though, that electronic voting machines - which is a fancy term for what they really are, namely, computers - will give us the same kind of check and balance in the event that something goes wrong.

As in the case of, for example, what went down in Northern Virginia last year, when voters in three Fairfax County precincts were foiled in their attempts to vote for a school-board candidate by a computer glitch that in some cases actually registered negative votes for the candidate of their choosing.

This and other e-voting horror stories being told across the country led Del. Ben Cline, R-Rockbridge, to introduce legislation in the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year that would require localities that use direct electronic voting machines to equip the machines with a paper-copy record of the votes cast "on a contemporaneous and continuing basis as votes are cast and accumulated on the device."

The bill and a companion piece introduced in the Virginia Senate were both carried over to the 2005 legislative session after it was determined that more study was needed before the General Assembly would want to take any decisive action.

Cline told us that there is support in the legislature for the concept - "There's a sense in the General Assembly that something needs to be done in this area," the delegate said.

"This is an area where there is great potential for abuse. I think it's incumbent upon the state and localities to make sure that elections are conducted in a safe and secure manner," Cline said.

We agree - and hope in the meantime that we don't hear more harrowing tales as the kind that came out of Fairfax County last fall, or Florida in '00.