To the Editor:

The editorial “Voting Machine Chosen” [March 17] is reassuring for those not interested in the problems of electronic voting. Good job, Commissioners – “responsible decision;” thanks, members of the Coalition for Voting Integrity, now run along, the “time for fighting is over.”

To understand how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) landed Pennsylvania in such a mess and compromised the integrity of our vote just think of other recent legislative initiatives like the “Clear Skies Initiative” and the “Medicare Prescription Drug Act.” The Administration first identifies a problem requiring legislation and then crafts it into a business opportunity to reward corporate supporters. Power companies are relieved of onerous environmental expenditures and subsidies are paid to pharmaceutical companies. The legislation is optimized for private profits and compliance with right-wing dogma but the citizenry and the country are short-changed.

From hanging chads in Florida we get HAVA ‘mandating’ the replacement of even functional lever machines by Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) computers (or optical scanners) at a cost to tax payers of $4 billion nationwide. The original sponsor of HAVA was Congressman Robert Ney [R, OH] who recently resigned his committee chairmanship over ties to the Abramoff scandal. Two of Ney’s aides were paid lobbyists for Diebold, a DRE company.

The Achilles heel of DREs is that their computer code cannot be made robustly secure. The best solution is a ‘paper trail’ duplicating the voter’s choice and which is counted separately so as to audit the DRE count. Then we could see if our DREs count truthfully or not.

Almost three years ago Congressman Holt introduced legislation, HR 550, requiring paper trails and audits. The bill has 190 co-sponsors yet has gotten no hearing. Why not? Because Congressman Ney won’t allow it – he’s blocked the bill. Why is he doing that? Because the voting machine companies don’t want it. Audits force reliable and accurate machines, and that costs money. And recounts, impossible without the separate audit capability, cost local authorities money.

Don’t kid yourselves, these machines cannot be trusted without audit supervision. It seems we no longer aspire to a high standard of voting integrity in Pennsylvania.

Michael J. Doyle
Upper Black Eddy