Better laws, better elections

Editorial   Wilmington Star   27 January 2005  
North Carolinians can have more confidence in the accuracy and honesty of their elections if the General Assembly takes the advice of a committee that studied what went wrong in November.

Its most important recommendation is that every voting machine, however it works, should produce a paper record.

That would allow voters to see that their choices had been accurately compiled. It would allow elections officials to use the paper record if machines lost votes, or if someone raised questions about the accuracy of the count.

Such an approach would have avoided the current legal battle over who won the race for agriculture commissioner. It was set off when a Carteret County machine digested 4,400 votes and refused to regurgitate them. It's theoretically conceivable, if exceedingly unlikely, that those lost votes would have changed the outcome of the race.

The controversy also prompted the committee to make another obvious proposal: that if ballots get lost, the people who cast them should be invited to vote again within two weeks.

Made up of legislators, election officials and regular folks, the committee offered some other ideas that look sensible, but might stand improvement.

One would allow state officials and party operatives to examine the computer gibberish that tells voting machines what to do. Assuming these wizards understood the gibberish, the rest of us might worry less that our votes were being changed or d.

The committee also suggests an ethics code that would discourage state and local election officials from doing business with their buddies. That would be a step forward only if it included specific provisions with serious penalties for violations. Otherwise, it would amount to little more than rhetorical cover for possible skulduggery.

Finally, there's a suggestion that ought to set off alarm bells, at least among the paranoid: that if paper ballots were lost, the electronic count would be considered final. Electronic counts could be rigged, paper backups swiped and elections stolen.

That might seem highly unlikely. But it also seemed highly unlikely that almost three months after an election, North Carolina wouldn't know for sure who won two statewide offices.