Accurate voting

Electronic ballots require a paper backup

The entire fabric of democracy rests on votes freely made and accurately counted.

We should never put either aspect in question. To doubt the authenticity of the election returns is to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of its outcome.

It is thus a stupefying flirtation with the destruction of the trust that binds citizens to accept the results of elections that 51 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties use electronic voting machines that provide no paper record to double-check and validate their accuracy.

Do we really need an election crisis, in which one glitch or another occurs or there's an attempt to manipulate the results, before these 51 counties -- including Cumberland, Dauphin, Lebanon, Perry and York -- get around to providing a voter-verifiable paper record of each ballot cast?

Pennsylvania is but one of 17 states that Common Cause cites as being at high risk of an inaccurate vote count. In the rush not to repeat the confusion and turmoil surrounding the contested presidential vote in Florida in 2000, we've gone from attempting to decipher "hanging chads" to having too many instances in which it is impossible to know whether votes have been counted accurately.

The toleration of this untenable state of affairs by both county and state officeholders is astonishing.

Fixing or replacing the unacceptable voting machines won't be cheap. But nothing less than the integrity of our elections is at stake. Too many elections have been held and are still to be held using machines that cannot be honestly certified as producing consistently reliable results.

It's time the state Legislature enacted a requirement that all voting machines provide paper-verifiable results, both for the voter and to audit the overall results. We urge the state also to provide funding to assist the changeover.

In any event, the restoration of voting machines that are verifiable needs to proceed without further delay.

http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1205521824300880.xml&coll=1