Voting system needs to be fixed

To the Editor:

In your editorial, "Voting glitch," you write, "There's something amiss with a voting system that records votes the wrong way even part of the time." This referred to the voting system in the State House of Representatives, but it could be made about the electronic voting system used throughout Bucks County in general elections as well.

In that editorial you describe how Rep. Marguerite Quinn had pushed a button to vote �no� on a State House bill, but it was recorded as a �yes� vote. She never would have known if Rep. Katharine Watson had not informed her that her vote had been recorded wrong on the vote-tally sheet.

Because there was a vote-tally sheet, Rep. Quinn could verify that her vote had been recorded incorrectly. Unfortunately, our electronic voting system here in Bucks County has no record independent of the software programming inside the machine. A voter can never know if his vote was counted correctly.

Bucks County needs to replace its electronic-voting system with the voting system that computer experts consider the most secure and accurate system available, a voter-marked paper ballot/optical scan system. Using this system, the voter marks a paper ballot, which is read by an optical scanner and saved for recounts and audits as the official paper record of the votes.

Your editorial concludes with this sentence: "Those who run the House need to find out what's going on with the voting process and then fix it."

Bucks County government needs to do this as well.

Pat Jimenez
Doylestown Twp.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/320-10162007-1424345.html