Half of states now require paper trail for elections
  
By Jim Drinkard   USA Today   14 August 2005
 
WASHINGTON Three years into a national debate over the security and reliability of computerized voting machines, the skeptics are winning.

In the past month, legislatures in five states Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Oregon have passed laws requiring computer-based voting machines to produce a paper backup that can be verified by the voter, according to Electionline .org, which monitors voting systems. That brings to 25 the number of states that require a paper trail.

Fourteen other states and the District of Columbia are considering similar legislation.

Paper printouts could be used to verify the electronic count, or as a fail-safe measure in case a recount is needed.

Advocates of requiring a paper trail say it is a response to voters' concerns about whether their ballots are being accurately tallied. Those concerns, they say, stem from the nation's traumatic experience with the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida and a continuing close split in the nation's politics.

Some election experts fear that paper records will add a layer of complexity to an already delicate system. That could lead to even worse problems in the 2006 elections, such as jammed printers and long voting lines, they say.

"The unintended consequence of a (paper trail) mandate could diminish, rather than enhance, voter confidence," says Conny McCormack, who runs elections in the nation's largest voting jurisdiction, Los Angeles County.

"When we start using paper trails in a live election, all of these problems are going to become apparent," says Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland Board of Elections.

One example already has cropped up. In a California test July 20 of touch-screen voting machines with printers, nearly 20 percent of the machines experienced problems, including paper jams and computer crashes. The machines were made by Diebold, a leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting equipment.

California has since banned the machines, and the test sent qualms through states such as Mississippi and Utah, which had decided to buy machines like those California rejected.

Maryland was among the first states to go to all-electronic voting after the problems of the 2000 election, and its experience has been good, Lamone says.

Only Nevada has used touch-screen voting with a paper backup in a statewide election, and that was last year. McCormack, who observed the Nevada voting, says most voters she saw didn't bother to check the printout.