The editorial from the New York Times editorial board ' Certified but Not Guaranteed' made the argument for a backup paper trail as well as better testing of electronic voting machines. Having read this piece, reminded me of other articles that I had read on the very same subject.
After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election and the stories coming out of Florida in which Volusia County had major issues with a memory card that seem to take away votes from Gore and redistribute them to Bush and the other candidates on the ballot there were calls then for a paper trail.
In the documentary “Uncounted; The New Math of American Elections’ brought to light a big issue with electronic machines. There was a rush to ‘fix’ the problems of the 2000 election. Electronic touch-screen and push button “DRE”s that are easy to manipulate in so many ways because of the proprietary coding of these machines, were purchased around the country. No one could easily check the programming of these machines to make sure that it was functioning correctly and reliably.
One study done by National Election Data Archive Project gave this graph to show the discrepancies on various types of voting technology:
It shows that touch screens have almost the same rate of discrepancies as the punch cards they were replacing. Optical scan was only slightly better. The paper ballots that are hand counted have the lowest instance of discrepancies according to this graph.
Since the 2004 elections there have been several well-research reports that have documented the deficiencies with paperless electronic voting. The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security at NYU School of Law found that the three most commonly purchased electronic voting systems in the nation are vulnerable to software attacks. This can threaten the integrity of a state or national elections that use these machines with out verifiable paper trail.
The Government Accounting Office, a nonpartisan research branch of Congress, found flaws in all areas of the electronic voting machines; security, access, and hardware controls in these systems along with weak security management practices by the machine vendors. The GAO report also identified operational failures in real elections.
On August 15 this year the New York Times ran an article saying that the flaws in voting machines used in many parts of U.S. will not be fixed in time for the vote in November. The backlogs at the testing laboratories that the Election Assistance Commission uses are to blame. The commission is the federal agency that oversees voting for the U.S.
As a result of the backlog the manufacturers and state election officials are saying that many jurisdictions will forgo important software updates meant to address a variety of issues, namely security and performance. Not only will the commission officials not be able to certify that flawed machines are repaired, they cannot provide software fixes and updates by the November election. In some cases, election officials have no choice but to buy machines that lack the current innovations and upgrades in order to have enough machines for the high turnout on election day that is predicted this year.
With the many issues still hampering electronic voting systems, it only seems to be logical that with electronic systems you would have voter verified paper records of some type. Anyone with any electronic gadget knows that there is a good chance at some point it will blue screen, kernel panic, or some snafu will cause data corruption. With a paper trail back up in the elections, when that happens, the election officials could then do a hand count and get a accurate voting tally. Also you as a voter would have peace of mind that your vote has been cast as you intended.
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