Prevent election fiascoes

House, Senate bills would provide way to avoid 2004's vote disasters

Opinion From Joseph Waymack of Elizabeth City, legislative director of the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting

15 June 2005

A voting nightmare revealed its ugly head here in North Carolina last November. Counties with paperless voting systems were plagued with problems.

Carteret County voting machines threw away 4,438 votes forever. Mecklenburg County's voting system counted 4,000 ballots twice. Guilford County's central tabulators counted backwards. Gaston County's voting system caused 12,000 votes to go uncounted. Craven County's voting system doubled-counted ballots. And we still don't have an elected superintendent of public instruction. The time for action rectifying these voting disasters has come.

Bills to address these problems are pending in each chamber of the state legislature: HB238 in the House of Representatives and SB223 in the Senate. These bills are the result of a bipartisan committee formed to study election problems in North Carolina. There are four major components of the bills which we must have to avoid catastrophe in the future and restore public confidence in the election system:

? Every voting machine must produce a voter-verified paper ballot so no votes will ever again be lost by computer crashes.

? The voting machine companies would have to allow state review of the currently secret source code used to program our voting machines (what actually counts our votes). We must be able to inspect the source code to ensure the bugs that have caused us so many problems in the past are caught in the future and to make certain that no rogue computer programmer decides to change the outcome of our elections.

? Election officials must conduct random audits of paper ballots to machine counts to make sure our votes are being counted and counted properly. It only takes a handful of accidental or intentional errors to cause candidate vote totals to be inverted. Just image what flipping a few races in either direction could mean for our country. If there is no funny business going on, what is the harm in responsible accounting?

? A code of ethics would be established for election officials. Our voting system is sacred to our democracy. Most election officials are dedicated, hardworking, and honest. However, some are not. Former Mecklenburg Election Director Bill Culp took over $100,000 in bribes and kickbacks in return for contracts on defective voting equipment. We need a clear code of ethics that prohibits conflicts of interest and makes it clear to election officials that they work for the people, not the voting machine companies.

Despite the overwhelming bipartisan support of HB238 and SB223, the bills have gone nowhere. Despite the fact that we need to move this year to take advantage of more than $50 million in federal funding set aside for upgrading machines, the bills have gone nowhere. Enough is enough. Let's send legislators a clear message:

We in North Carolina want an election system free from inaccuracy, malfunction and fraud. Contact your legislators and the leadership of the General Assembly: Speaker Jim Black, (919) 733-3451, jimb@ncleg.net; Senate President Pro Tempore Marc Basnight, (919) 733-6854, marcb@ncleg.net; and Senate Judiciary I Committee Chairman Dan Clodfelter, (919) 715-8331, danielc@ncleg.net.

Ask them to pass HB238 and SB223 without amendment. See www.ncvoter.net for more.