Weekly update of my legislative agenda issue.
A couple of bills that were sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee last week not only emerged but actually have passed the General Assembly. SB62 (Howell), which deals with registration receipts, and SB536 (Barker), which deals with additional testing of voting machines, move us a little closer to having some semblance of verifiable voting in Virginia. Howell’s bill will provide a receipt to voters at the time of registration and it will include a phone number that the individual can call to verify that s/he is registered. Barker’s bill lays the groundwork for additional testing of machines prior to them being placed in service. From an email I received from New ERA for Virginia:
Virginia localities will be buying a lot of new machines in coming years as they switch to optical scan, so improving standards now is important.
SB35 (Deeds), which will require that hard copy op-scan ballots be rerun through the machines in the event of a recount, has also passed the General Assembly and is awaiting the Governor’s signature. From the same email:
This is a simple but important bill that tells election officials that in the case of an election close enough to require a recount, the officials should in fact count the ballots again; i.e., optical scan ballots are to be run through the scanners a second time. (Of course, there’s nothing you can do to recount a DRE.) Our coalition was able to amend this bill in the Senate to ensure that the scanners went through a second round of logic and accuracy testing before reading the ballots again, so we have some level of confidence about the accuracy of the results.
It seems like a no-brainer to me that in the event of a recount, the ballots should be recounted. I’m truly amazed that it took so much effort to get this bill passed.
The baby inch taken in the area of audits that I wrote about last week plus the passage of SB35 allow me to mark this legislative agenda issue as a “win,” although I remain disappointed in the audit area. Perhaps next year more progress can be made in this area, along with the goal of the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia to have a voter-verified paper trail.
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VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 