The Coalition for Voting Integrity is nothing if not persistent.  The group has been arguing for years now that touch-screen voting machines—the kind first used in Bucks County last November---are inherently flawed and subject to serious irregularities because they do not include voter-verified paper ballots.  The group favors an optical scan system that requires voters to review a paper summary of their choices before they are tabulated.

 

The coalition has run into a stone wall with its protests and has been particularly miffed with the Bucks County commissioners, who after hemming and hawing and missing a federal deadline for choosing a new machine in time for last May’s primary decided to buy the Danaher touch-screen machine, the kind of machine the coalition has been most critical of.  The commissioners insist the Danaher was the most cost-conscious choice and produced a flawless election last November while drawing raves from voters for its ease of use.  The coalition would have none of it, always going back to what it sees as the machine’s fundamental shortcoming: the absence of a truly verifiable paper trail.

 

We half-expected the coalition to fade away after the commissioners made their decision and were so heaping with the praise of the machine’s performance in November.  Not so.  The coalition has taken the next step in challenging the voting machines.  It was able to purchase 10 machines from counties in Tennessee and North Carolina which, unlike Bucks County, were not satisfied with the machines’ supposed potential for inaccuracies and were willing to part with them for next to nothing.  So for $25 each (they go for about $5,000 new), the coalition got hold of 10 machines that it plans to have disassembled, basically to see what makes them tick.

 

The hope is, of course, that exposing the inner working of the machines will bear out what the coalition has been saying all along: that electronic machines that do not produce an independent paper trail are subject to all sorts of funny business:  voting under and overcounts, miscounts and outright fraud.  Studying the internal electronics of these voting machines isn’t the easiest thing to do, noted Lehigh University computer science and engineering professor Dan Lopresti, who plans to dismantle one of the machines, because of their proprietary nature and vendors’ reluctance to divulge trade secrets.

Admittedly, the coalition has been persevering to the point of madness.  But the jury apparently is still out on the touch-screen machines; they evoke as much critical comment as compliments from the communities that have purchased them.

 

It’s more than a bit ironic that the greatest democracy/republic the world has ever known has had so much trouble coming up with a voting system that is near foolproof and that both of the last two presidential elections have raised more than a few questions about voting irregularities.  We would just like to see the nation get it right.  We would just like to see the votes of every individual tabulated as cast and have no reason to doubt that a vote for John Smith or Mary Jones is recorded as a vote for Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones.

To the voting machine dissection teams, we say, overlook nothing.  Give us a definitive thumbs up or a thumbs down.  Let’s have voting machines we can rely on without reservation.