PA: Paper-based voting systems winning supporters

Monday, February 19, 2007
By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

For Original Article

WASHINGTON -- Marybeth Kuznik, Pennsylvania's loudest advocate for paper-based voting systems, swears she isn't against computers.

On the contrary, she can't function without them. Her organization, VotePA, relies on the Internet to connect with scores of like-minded activists across the country. Google has helped her amass an encyclopedic knowledge of high-tech voting technology, at a time when local governments have just finished spending millions of dollars to upgrade their equipment.

But Ms. Kuznik, 51, an actress, director and singer who raises palomino quarter horses on a Westmoreland County farm and serves as a poll worker with her elderly mother, is not ready to entrust her right to vote to the digital world.

"People need to have faith in their democracy," she said last week in the lobby of a Hyatt hotel here, a sleek Macintosh iBook sitting on her lap. "For most people, that means they want to see it on a piece of paper."

That goal increasingly is within reach. High-ranking Democrats in both the House and Senate are voicing strong support for legislation requiring voting machines to use paper trails that enable voters to check their choices.

If it wins approval, voting rights activists like Ms. Kuznik, of Penn Township, would deserve much of the credit. In recent years, she has traveled to Washington and Harrisburg dozens of times, spoken at election board meetings throughout Western Pennsylvania, and attended more voting equipment testing sessions than most computer scientists.

She was also the lead plaintiff last year in a lawsuit that tried to block the introduction of new voting machines, a move that hardly endeared her to local and state election officials who were scrambling to get their systems in line with federal requirements. A top machine tester for the state said her concerns largely weren't based on sound science.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against her.

"That was difficult. It held up a lot of counties," said Harry VanSickle, the state's election commissioner. "But she had every right to do it."

He described Ms. Kuznik, who was sitting a few feet away, as a "polite" advocate for her cause. Both were in Washington, D.C., for a meeting of election administrators, with Ms. Kuznik wearing the bright orange blazer that is her unofficial uniform when she lobbies lawmakers.

"Marybeth is unbelievable," said Warren Stewart, policy director for VoteTrustUSA, a national organization that counts about 70 local ones, including VotePA, as loose affiliates. "She's a volunteer for democracy. She's one of the best examples of people all over the country who are doing this."

Their movement has its roots in Florida's 2000 presidential election woes, which led to the federal Help America Vote Act and billions of dollars in aid for new voting machines.

At the time, Ms. Kuznik's only experience with voting equipment was her time with the aging lever machines in a precinct in Penn Township's 4th Ward. After the 2004 election, she worked in Ohio as one of several thousand observers of a statewide recount.

Widespread reports of voting irregularities convinced her and many other advocates, including Mr. Stewart, to stick with the issue.

Ms. Kuznik started to learn as much as she could about new voting technology and founded VotePA, a group that relies largely on private donations and draws support across the political spectrum, from Democrats, Republicans and independents.

"She's on the frontline, and we back her," said Audrey Glickman, of Greenfield, a member who shared an Oakland apartment with Ms. Kuznik in the 1970s when both were studying theater at the University of Pittsburgh.

The group has become a fixture at almost all meetings of the Allegheny County Board of Elections, and members expressed significant disappointment when county Chief Executive Dan Onorato settled on the ES&S iVotronic as the county's new machine. Most advocates prefer optical scanners that read fill-in-the-bubble paper ballots.

Mr. Onorato has said he wants to add paper printers to iVotronic touch-screen machines, but the Pennsylvania Constitution and state law require votes to be private, and officials say the touch-screen machine printers could violate that privacy. That is because the printers, which use continuous rolls of paper, could be matched up with logbooks at the voting precincts and reveal voters' choices.

But events seem to be turning in favor of the optical scanner.

Florida Gov. Charlie Christ, a Republican, announced recently that the state would dispose of touch-screen units, following discrepancies in a congressional race in Sarasota, where voters used the iVotronic.

The Virginia Senate also passed a bill that would gradually replace touch-screen units with the optical scanners. And Congress is considering making broad changes to the Help America Vote Act.

Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who tests voting machines for Pennsylvania, says the sudden rush to throw out touch-screen machines is irresponsible.

"The situation in Congress has gotten to the point where only advocates are being heard, and no scientific evidence is being presented, so the debate is now purely political," he said in an e-mail message.

He acknowledges that scores of computer scientists support advocacy groups like VotePA, but he argues that they've moved beyond their impartial roles as academics.

Doug Chapin, director of the non-partisan electionline.org, said the debate over a mandatory paper component in voting has blurred some of the nuances of the issue. Electronic touch-screen machines avoid some of the problems of paper ballots, such as stray marks made by voters that confuse the optical scanners.

But activists like Ms. Kuznik organized quickly around a simple message that has caught the attention of many state legislatures and, now, Congress.
"People understand the concept of a piece of paper that they can look at," said Mr. Chapin. "It's a compelling argument."