IT MAY
BE GOOD NEWS that pending legislation in the House would require a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast in national
elections beginning in November 2008. The lack of this “paper trail” has been one of the main objections of those
who think that electronic voting machines, such as the Danaher model used in Bucks County, are ripe for abuse and do not provide
voters with any verification that their votes are recorded as they were cast.
But isn't this just like Washington bureaucrats, who several years ago passed an election
reform act costing billions that was aimed at correcting some of the technology and registration problems that came to a head
in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Now most of those same lawmakers are considering passing another bill, which will probably
cost many billions more when all is said and done, to reform the reform.
Most of the costs, of course, will be borne by the states and local election boards,
which have been through one such expensive exercise already trying to conform to federal election guidelines. Now there's
pending legislation in the House to change those guidelines again, because American confidence in the electoral process has
actually dropped since 2000.
Ironically, Congress seems to be going backward in its effort to ensure the fairness,
accuracy and reliability of the most basic duty in a democracy: the duty to vote. Paper ballots in some form have been in
use since antiquity and are still common in many developing lands. Paper may be slow, but it's been proven as reliable for
soliciting and counting votes as any of the fancy technology we have today. And paper ballots — something that can be
seen and touched — engender voter confidence in a way that the makers of electronic machines have been unable to duplicate.
State and local election officials and election machine makers have been screaming
that the new House bill sets unrealistic timelines, is unnecessarily cumbersome and restrictive and will cost a whole lot
more than the $1 billion allotted to replace existing voting systems, which in a lot of cases haven't been existing for very
long. We're almost certain these officials are right on about the cost issue. And to make the required changeover in little
over a year? That's more than a little much to ask as well.
The executive director of the Election Center
of the National Association of Election Officials, R. Doug Lewis, feels the pending bill is so objectionable that, if it's
passed, he would recommend that state and local officials refuse to run federal elections.
Many voting activists say optical scan voting equipment is the way to go; it would
combine the use of modern, fast counting methods with a paper ballot that could be independently verified if the need arose.
These folks simply don't trust electronic machines, where all the tabulating is integrated into the computer software and
the final vote is what the machine says it is. Period.
Leave it to the federal government to muck up something so essential as voting. No
wonder the nation is beset by so many problems.
