Election 2006: Are Oregon’s elections accurate?

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http://www.theportlandalliance.org/2006/july/election2006accurate.htm

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Election 2006: Are Oregon’s elections accurate?

By Jacob Fenston

Six years after the presidential election highlighted flaws in the election system, voter-rights groups say those defects haven’t been fixed, and in some cases have only gotten worse. As state primaries are held across the country, voter rights advocates point to a swath of voting machine malfunctions and programming flaws that they say could lead to a “trainwreck” this fall when voters in all 50 states simultaneously cast their ballots in general elections.

Oregon votes may be at risk too. Though Oregonians cast votes on paper, those paper ballots are tallied by machine — the same machines getting flack nationwide for their vulnerability to fraud or malfunction. Voter-rights groups say Oregon needs a mandatory audit, requiring a hand count of some portion of ballots to compare with the machine-tallied results.

Much of the national debate has recently focused around touch-screen voting terminals, also known as Direct Electronic Recording machines (DERs). Following the 2000 presidential election’s hanging-chad debacle, DERs were promoted as a more reliable way to tally votes. But computer experts warn that these machines are susceptible to hackers or programming errors. So far this year, lawsuits have been filed in four states to either ban or restrict the use of DERs. New Mexico has passed a law prohibiting their use.