The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
PA: Poll machines must be changed to verify that ballots are accurate
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/09/2006 - 12:10pm
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/yyqw8k
Pennsylvania is one of a declining number of states using voting machines without a verifiable paper record. But that could be about to change, with the new Democratic Congress expected to mandate that voting machines in all jurisdictions provide a "voter-verified" paper trail.
About three-quarters of the counties in Pennsylvania, complying with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), opted for touch-screen voting machines that record votes digitally. In most cases, the counties bought machines that do not provide a paper record. Machines that do are more expensive, but the purchase of the cheaper machines appears likely to prove to be a penny-wise, pound-foolish decision.
Although pre-election concerns with a nationwide meltdown at polling places -- with a third of the jurisdictions using new voting systems -- failed to materialize, it's not clear that elections officials and the public would know in all cases if something was awry without a paper record to verify the results.
As it is, the outcome of a Florida congressional race remains in doubt following the discovery in Sarasota County that 18,000 voters failed to indicate a choice in that race on touch-screen machines similar to those used in some central Pennsylvania counties. That rate of "no votes" was four to five times higher than in other counties in the district.
Legislation being pushed by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., would mandate that every voting machine provide a paper trail verified by the voter, which already is required in 27 states. The bill has 212 supporters, only two shy of a majority. In the Senate, California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein, who will chair the Rules and Administration Committee, which overseas elections, plans to hold hearings on electronic voting next year.
The Help America Vote Act was prompted by the 2000 election vote-count fiasco in Florida, in which it was generally agreed that there should not be another election in which there were so many questioned votes. But in not requiring a paper trail, HAVA has arguably made matters worse in states, such as Pennsylvania, where there is no means to verify the digitally recorded vote.
As we have written here before, this is an unacceptable situation. Citizens have an absolute right to know that their vote is being counted and counted correctly. Voting machines without a voter-verified paper trail do not do that.
The state Legislature should have dealt with this issue by now.
It's unfortunate that federal legislation is necessary to require counties in this state to do what they should have done in the beginning, and ought to be moving to correct now before another election comes and goes using machines no one can be certain are rendering a true and accurate count.
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