Federal panel urges e-voting paper trail
Schwarzenegger considers bill for state, faces an Oct. 9 deadline to sign or veto it

By Ian Hoffman     ANG News    20 September 2005

For American voters to regain faith in their elections, voters should be given a unique identification card, and electronic voting machines need a paper record that voters can check and elections officials can recount, a prestigious federal panel reported Monday.

The Commission on Federal Voting Reforms call for Congress to require a voter-verified paper trail for recounts nationwide comes as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger considers signing a bill that would do that in California.

Election officials from Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to local registrars of voters oppose the measure because the paper printouts dont fit the state legal definition of a ballot and because recounting them would be onerous and time-consuming.

The federal panel, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, concluded that e-voting machines need to produce paper trails for recounts to instill greater confidence and ensure transparency in U.S. elections.

Paper trail advocates in Congress and the California Legislature hailed the report and urged passage of a law requiring use of paper trails, including for the states mandatory recount of 1 percent of all precincts in elections. California has had an automatic recount since the 1960s as a check on the accuracy of computerized vote tallies.

Relying on the electronic machines own tally to satisfy the 1 percent manual count law, as Californias elections officials are doing now, undermines the 40-year-old law designed to require an independent hand audit of Californias election results, said Debra Bowen, the Marina Del Ray Democrat who chairs the Senate Elections and Reapportionment  Committee and co-authored the bill.

I wish the secretary of state and the county elections officials were as concerned about the accuracy and the integrity of the election results as they are with how quickly the ballots are counted, Bowen said in a prepared statement.

The governors office has declined to discuss his position on the bill. He faces an Oct. 9 deadline to sign or veto it.

Paper trails are now mandatory in 25 states and legislation is under consideration in an additional 14 states.

Civil-rights advocates were less impressed with the Carter-Baker report, saying the panel didnt go far enough in encouraging voter participation.

The commission shied away from recommending voting rights for convicted felons on probation or parole. Nor did the panel recommend same-day registration or a single, national standard on the handling of provisional ballots, a matter of controversy in the 2004 elections.

Those ideas are likely to bring more voters to the polls, according to the Chief Justice Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of Californias Boalt Hall School of Law.