Votes might get paper receipts

By Mike Billips

Macon Telegraph   01 March 2005

A state lawmaker wants to create a paper trail of each vote cast on Georgia's electronic ballot machines, but the proposal may have to wait for federal action.

Rep. Tim Bearden, R-Douglasville, introduced a bill last week that would require a printout after an electronic vote was cast, which a voter could review. The paper ballots would be kept in case of a recount or challenge of an election.

"I feel like we owe it to the people to give them something they can trust," Bearden said.

Bearden makes an ironic champion for this issue, which has been hotly pushed on liberal Web logs and talk radio. Bearden is a self-described conservative best known for authoring a bill to allow a referendum vote on the 1956 state flag.

He said he didn't see worries about the integrity of electronic voting as a partisan issue.

"I think it's a people issue," Bearden said. "I think conservatives ought to be sure that people are taken care of. We want to make sure they trust the politicians."

State elections officials said they are looking at a way to create an individual voting receipt, but they cautioned against moving too quickly. The current Diebold machines contain an internal printer, but it is designed only for two or three printouts at the end of the voting day and is locked inside the voting machine during operation.

"It's not a very robust printer," said Chris Ringall, a spokesman for Secretary of State Cathy Cox. "And there's the problem of having a secret ballot when the printer prints a continuous record that can be matched to a voter."

Lengthy ballots are a problem as well, Ringall said. One vote with many judicial and local elections in Fulton County resulted in a test printout 51 inches long.

Bearden's proposal would require that a voter be able to look over a paper ballot and place it in a separate ballot box, to be reviewed only in the event of a challenge or electronic malfunction.

"What if there is a glitch and you lose 500 votes?" Bearden said. "Five hundred votes is a lot in some elections."

The Georgia Secretary of State's Office wants to ensure that any printout system will not cause more inaccuracy or voting delays than the current system, he said. In a recent MIT study, Georgia has improved from second-worst state in the nation in terms of voting error since instituting electronic voting. The state now rates in a tie for second-best with Florida, behind only Maryland, Ringall said.

The federal government has tasked the National Institute of Standards and Technology to study electronic voting and generate voting system standards, Ringall said. Such standards are needed because "there are a lot of different views from manufacturers, from voters' groups, as to what paper receipts should do," he said.

Along with hardware changes, a printout system would also require retraining poll workers, Ringall said. "If only 1 percent of precincts couldn't open because somebody couldn't get the machines operating, that would be considered a catastrophe," he said.

A similar bill has been proposed in the state Senate by Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta.

Bearden said he expects this year's session will end before his bill comes up for a vote in both houses, but he hopes to see it pass next year.