If they can give you a slip of paper verifying an electronic transaction from an ATM machine, then they can give you a piece of paper verifying your vote. This isn’t rocket science, folks. Putting paper trails on electronic voting machines is a no-brainer to me. Just take a look at what’s going on in Florida:
But scrutiny is focused on Sarasota County, where touch-screen voting machines recorded that 18,382 people — 13 percent of voters in the Nov. 7 election — did not vote for either Republican Vern Buchanan or Democrat Christine Jennings, despite casting ballots in other races on the ballot. That rate was much higher than other counties in the district.
With paper trails, as proposed by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Lest you think the problem only exists in Florida:
Holt also said at least one electronic voting machine in New Jersey’s Ocean County counted votes twice, and some were also added to vote totals for the Senate, county freeholder and county sheriff races in Lakewood, according to a published report.
HR550 is on track.
Holt’s “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act” had the support of 219 House members before last week’s election and now has 221 bipartisan co-sponsors, his office said.
The bill would require that all voting systems produce a voter-verified paper record for use in manual audits; ban the use of undisclosed software and all wireless and concealed communications devises in voting systems; and establish procedures to be followed if there is a discrepancy between reported results and audit results.
Let’s get this thing done. Contact your representatives and urge their support of HR550.
Technorati Tags: Paper verified voting
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
This is the United States of America. This is the 21st Century.
The idea that we are holding elections in which the outcome can be doubted is a travesty. It also threatens the bedrock of our Constitutional Republic. I believe Jennings won the election. I believe thousands more voters went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Gore over Bush.
It is more republican corruption and incompetence towards governance that fails to address and fix a problem presented to them.
Vote by mail seems to be a reasonable solution. Why do we have to go to the polls?
I think voting by mail is a great option, however, I don’t expect VA to implement that any time soon. Look at how hard it was to get motor-voter implemented in VA.
“I think voting by mail is a great option, however, I don’t expect VA to implement that any time soon. Look at how hard it was to get motor-voter implemented in VA. ”
I agree Vivian. There probably will not be any progress as of right now. There are a couple of issues that I want to bring up with my delegate this year. Vote by mail is one of them. Hopefully, we can get the ball rolling because to me the right to vote is the life blood of our system of government.
My experience with USPS has been dreadful. I am talking about mail to and from my office. Each year, we mail out tons of assessment letters, and thousands of them are “lost in the mail” or returned as undeliverable, eventhough the taxpayers never moved. Never mind about mailed tax payments that never reach us.
The Voter Registrar is located upstairs from my office. I would imagine that she would encounter the same mail problems.
I don’t trust USPS with my ballot.
Good point, Ingrid. One of the many reasons I file tax returns electronically. In the old days, I could always count on one or two returns getting lost each year.
Vivian,
Solid post, I think I’m actually linking it on our little blog at BYPI.
A few quick thoughts I have on this have seemingly been echoed. Mr. Stanton above makes a great point in that we live in the 21st century United States, to ever have a contested election is a travesty.
If Rep. Holt had that much support in the 109th Congress, this should get all kinds of bipartisan support in the 110th.
If it is not going to be paper-less, then what is the point of it being electronic?
If you have the paper trail, you might as well, just stay with paper and say forget it to the electronic. It is like putting a Plam Pilot in a paper Day planner. WTF?!?!?
I stink… Plam = Palm
SW – nearly every electronic device – save our voting machines – has a paper trail that records the information separately and allows for the totals in the machine to be matched up to the documents. Without it, one must presume that the totals recorded by the machine are correct. If the machine malfunctions, there is no way to tell, except for statistical anomalies, like those experienced in FL.
Cash registers, ATM machines and so forth have duplicate tapes inside which allow an audit of the transactions. Our no-audit-trail voting machines don’t.
Electronic shouldn’t mean that we give up the ability to verify the totals.
The biggest question I have is why have our authorities been so reluctant to have paper-trails for voting machines. What are they trying to hide?
And BTW – they make Day Planner holders for PDAs 😉
One more thing – they could easily use scanners instead of touch screens. If they used scanners, they would still have a paper trail for backup.
“And BTW – they make Day Planner holders for PDAs ” I know and I think they are stupid (As I glance over at mine 🙂 Of course there is no PDA in it. Seemed dumb to put info in two places, so I chose the paper one.
I have no problem with accountability and you make a good point. I am not in opposition to what you are saying, I just think that the only thing that will make conspiracy people (AKA the DNC) happy is to basically have a paper vote, so why not just do that?
Indeed, I was just across from Ingrid’s office yesterday, paying a bill that had never arrived by mail . . .
That said, I’m willing to bet the error rate for USPS is a fraction of what we’ve got with the electronic voting machines, now. The resistance (on the part of the gov’t) to verified voting mechanisms is something that just boggles me.
Um, Squeak – note that the support for the bill is bipartisan 😉
I’m about as far right as possible, and I entirely agree with Vivian here. The problem with only paper ballots was that the operatives would be outside with a pre-marked paper ballot. The voter would deposit that ballot in the box, and would be paid upon giving his blank ballot to the operative outside.
With purely electronic voting, there is no audit capability. My precint gets about 2000 voters each election. It would not be difficult for the poll workers to count the paper ballots (as they did in the past) to verify the results of the electronic voting.