Election Matters: The Paper Ballot
Have you ever walked away from the voting booth and wondered if your vote was counted? Many voters, candidates, and advocates are concerned about votes being recorded accurately – especially as the 2008 presidential election approaches.
Once upon a time, computer technology was considered to be the answer to the flawed 40-year-old manual voting machines. But now, there are serious doubts about the security of touch-screen voting machines, also known as direct-recording electronic voting machines (DREs).
The debate over DREs is a passionate one. Supporters insist that DREs are accurate and safe and that system testing and encryption ensures a secure paperless vote. Opponents say that without a voter-verified paper trail, there is no way to guarantee that all votes have been tallied correctly.
What’s being done
U.S. Congressman Rush Holt (Democrat- NJ) introduced an emergency voting rights bill on January 18th, 2008 that he says will address the lack of hand-marked paper ballots in some states. In many districts, the only figures available for disputed elections are from the DREs.
The bill is an updated version of legislation that Holt introduced in 2007 requiring a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast and routine random audits.
Voting reforms are traditionally a state matter, and Holt’s emergency legislation would not require a nationwide standard, but instead would give states the option to replace paperless DREs with hand-marked paper ballots using federal funding.
A similar bill, the Vote Integrity and Verification Act of 2007, introduced by Senators Bill Nelson (D-FL) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) on February 13, 2007, would go further, banning touch-screen voting in federal elections starting in 2012.
The bill would also require routine audits in at least three percent of the precincts in all federal elections, and appropriate as much as $1 billion to help states move back to optical scanning (or any method that provides a reliable paper trail).
The paper trail movement
In 2003, a group of concerned computer science professors from Stanford began arguing that computerized voting machines should have a paper-audit component. One of the most outspoken of the group, Professor David Dill, was consequently placed on a task force for election reform and succeeded in convincing then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley (D) of the importance of a paper trail.
What do we do with the paper records?
The question of what to do with paper records has people arguing as well.
Twenty-five states already have laws demanding that voters verify and then hand over to election officials a paper ballot, and 16 of those require that these paper "receipts" be considered in the case of any recount. On the other hand, laws in Nevada and Idaho stipulate that the electronic ballots, and not the paper audit, should be used.
For advocates of the paper trail, using paper ballots to recount makes sense because the paper representation of the ballot is well understood, and hey, why not use them when you went to all this trouble?
But those opposed say that recounting paper ballots is too time-consuming, especially since they must be hand counted, as there is no machine to process them by the thousands like punch-card ballots.
Optical Scanning
Following scandals such as the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Florida - where GRE’s recorded 18,000 ballots cast as registering no choice at all, in a race decided by only 386 votes - Florida Governor Charlie Crist moved immediately after his January inauguration to return the state to paper votes recorded by optical scanning.
Many voter rights advocates say that optical scanning systems, in which votes are marked on a sheet which is saved for auditing purposes and then electronically scanned, are the most trustworthy way to count votes and insure fair elections.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, issued highly critical assessment of touch-screen in favor of optical scanning in late 2007.
What do you think?
Do you think a paper trail is necessary? How should recounts be conducted?
Click here to see what voting system is used in your state, then let your representatives know how it compares with what you’d like to see on Election Day.
Enter your zip code below to let your representative know what you think:
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