Add voting machine paper trail

Opinion   Atlanta Journal-Constitution   03/10/05

Despite some criticism, Georgia's standardized electronic voting machines have proved a major improvement over the hodgepodge of obsolete methods that sometimes produced unreliable results in past elections. But the time is nearing when the state's 24,500 touch-screen machines can ? and should ? be made even better by equipping them with printers that crank out a tangible record of every ballot cast.

Support for that common-sense proposition seems to be building in the General Assembly. Senate Democrat Vincent Fort of Atlanta has introduced a bill calling for voting machines to create a verifiable paper trial; House Republican Tim Bearden of Villa Rica is sponsoring a similar measure.
The benefits of such a system are twofold: It would enable voters to immediately cross-check their candidate ions on the screen against a paper printout. Although voters would not be allowed to keep hard copies, the record would be permanently archived.

It's unlikely either measure will be approved during this session of the Legislature, if only because the money to retrofit Georgia's voting machines ? estimated at $17 million ? doesn't appear forthcoming. But the considerable cost of the upgrade hasn't prevented Las Vegas and California from mandating voter-verifiable paper trails for future elections. New York and Maryland lawmakers are considering it as well.

Several states have been modernizing their voting systems since the agonizing 2000 election that kept the fate of the presidency seemingly suspended by a hanging chad. But that doesn't excuse the continued failure of Congress, which passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to demand the speedier implementation of national standards for electronic balloting to ensure that voters in Harlem, Ga., have as much confidence in the integrity of the system as those in Harlem, N.Y.

The federal government must be more actively involved in developing those standards and providing adequate funding to help cash-strapped states comply with them.