Digital voting machines a great step, but where's the paper trail?
04/13/2005   Editorial    The Houston Courier

 Our View: Digital voting is great, but without a real paper trail future elections could lead to mass voter distrust of the system - and possible fraud

The county is preparing to enter the new age of electronic voting, but thanks to a lack of clear guidance from the state or federal government it will be doing so without what many critics believe is a crucial safeguard: a paper trail, verified by voters themselves.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002, spawned in part by the confusing Florida presidential election of 2000, requires counties throughout the United States to have electronic voting equipment in place in each polling site by Jan. 1, 2006.
The Montgomery County Election Equipment Task Force recently recommended unanimously that the county purchase direct electronic voting machines (DREs) to install in each of the county's 85 voting precincts, at a cost of up to $2 million for the machines alone to enable full conversion to electronic voting. On Monday, county commissioners approved that recommendation and laid plans to begin soliciting bids for the machines.
All well and good, but the machines to be installed by 2006 will be lacking a voter-verifiable paper trail. A number of organizations concerned about potential fraud and errors in electronic voting have pushed for DREs to include a voter-verifiable paper ballot - in addition to whatever voting is done on screen - in order to provide a permanent, hard record of each vote that can serve as a backup and auditing tool in the event of machine malfunction or intentional manipulation. Under a voter-verifiable system, voters would have to review a paper record of their vote and approve it before their electronic vote is recorded and saved. Other electronic voting machines do create paper records, but voters don't have a chance to review and approve them.
The push for a voter-verified paper trail is not the product of technophobes who mistrust any new technology. So far, 12 states have passed laws requiring a vote-by-vote paper trail. Similar legislation is pending in the Texas Legislature and in Congress. But until the Legislature acts and the Secretary of State's Office certifies a DRE system and requires a voting paper trail, Montgomery County won't be able to buy such a system because it won't meet with the state's own certification standards, said Carol Chedsey Gaultney, Montgomery County elections administrator.
So why not just trust digital voting machines to get it right, and why not trust the security systems that can be put in place to prevent fraud? What have voter-verified paper trails?
Here's why. Around the country, machines already have malfunctioned numerous times. In Miami-Dade County in Florida just last month, electronic voting machines tossed out hundreds of ballots by mistake, thanks to "bad coding" that one supervisor attributed to human error. The machines had no voter-verified paper trail.
The need for a separate tool to verify the accuracy of an election becomes especially crucial in very close elections. Voters already are inclined to question the system when the vote is tight - what will they do when they are told they just need to "trust" the digital voting system, without knowing there was a separate paper copy of their vote somewhere that they approved?
Adding the paper trail capability to electronic voting machines will be more expensive. But it's the right thing to do. The Legislature and Congress need to get on the ball and clear the way for Montgomery County and others in Texas to buy the right kinds of machines.