Electronic voting requires verification

Virginia shouldn't spend another dime on voting equipment that doesn't provide a paper trail.

Editorial      The Roanoke Times    24 August 2005

Virginia would make a massive, expensive and damaging mistake by spending any more money on electronic voting equipment that does not have a voter-verifiable paper trail.

Virginia Verified Voting, an advocacy group in Arlington County, made that point repeatedly at a joint legislative subcommittee meeting on Monday.

Without such a paper trail, there is no reliable way to conduct a recount, and no way to determine whether a computer tally erred, through either malfunction or malfeasance, group representatives said.

The push toward electronic voting equipment accelerated with the 2000 Florida hanging-chad fiasco. Relying on a century-old technology to determine the leader of the free world no longer seemed like such a great idea.

But accumulating evidence proves that many electronic voting machines are anything but foolproof.

Several respected computer scientists have sounded warnings about the vulnerability of such systems to outside tampering. And numerous glitches have demonstrated that some sort of backup method is needed.

Thus the call for a paper trail, which can be achieved in a number of different ways. Touch-screen machines can include printers that will give voters a receipt they can check against the votes they cast.

Once verified, that receipt is handled with the same care and security as the old paper ballots. If a problem arises, the paper receipts can be checked against the electronic totals. Random samples can be used to test the accuracy of the electronic counts, even absent any known errors.

Optical scanners are another proven option. Voters mark spaces on a paper ballot that is read by an electronic machine. Voters scan the ballots themselves and verify that their votes were counted correctly, and the original paper ballot is kept as a backup.

Recent events have done much to erode confidence in the electoral process and such confidence is necessary for a democracy to function.

If the electorate cannot trust the vote count, it cannot trust the legitimacy of the government that results.

And the only way to really trust an electronic vote count is to preserve a paper record.