To the Editor: 

Thank you for the Dec. 12 front-page article, “Congress may back paper trail for voters.” Congress does need to pass legislation immediately that would mandate and fund the replacement of direct recording electronic voting machines (DREs) before any more elections. Vote totals on these electronic voting machines cannot be trusted because voters have not been able to verify that the votes they intended to cast have been registered, recorded and counted correctly. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology stated in its report to the Election Assistance Commission,  DREs cannot be properly audited without voter-verified paper records. NIST also reported that DREs “cannot be made secure” and called for the decertification of DREs and their replacement by machines that have voter-verified paper records that are saved for recounts and audits and are not dependent on machine software. 

However, reflecting the attitude of many state and county elected and election officials who do not want to have to compare paper totals with machine totals, the Election Assistance Commission has decided that DREs already in use do not need to be replaced, but that only new DREs will need to conform to NIST recommendations. In other words, voters in Bucks, Montgomery and numerous other counties must continue to vote on insecure and inaccurate DREs, which  would seem to violate the “equal protection clause” of the Constitution. Congress must pass legislation that mandates that these externally paperless DREs be replaced now and provide funding to the counties to do so. Every vote must be counted as it is the foundation of our democratic system and the safeguard of all our other rights. How can the government justify having spent billions to create a democratic system in Iraq, and deny funds needed to ensure democracy here?