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June 21, 2004 - Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels April 17, 2004 Electronically run elections leave no paper trail If you think the 2000 Florida presidential election was a mess, just wait until this year's election when many localities are scheduled to start using electronic voting machines that do not provide a printed record. Computer experts have been telling us for years that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors, which includes innocent ones as well as fraud. Not only do they enable people with an agenda to sabotage an election (easily), as some claim has already happened in Georgia, but software errors are unavoidable. Election software is complex and it is bound to contain errors, regardless of the skill and dedication of the professionals who design and code it. Paperless voting machines mean that voters have no way of knowing whether or not the machines have accurately tallied their votes, and election officials have no way of recounting the ballots in a close race. No paper trail, no recount. Here are some examples of electronic elections gone awry during 2003: In New Mexico, touch-screens failed to count 12,000 out of 48,000 votes; in Texas, the machines wouldn't start and votes were written on make-shift pieces of paper; in Indiana, computers counted 140,000 votes for only 19,000 voters; in Virginia, computers subtracted one in every 100 votes cast for a certain candidate; in Florida, computers lost 134 votes in a race where the winning margin was only 12 votes. After the debacle in the 2000 Florida election, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act in 2002 to reform the election processes of states. The Act requires the replacement of all punch-card systems, but it does not require a paper record of each ballot. By omitting this requirement, Congress has actually moved the nation away, rather than toward democracy. What is so difficult about producing a slip of paper after each person votes? Even third world countries have ATMs where the user receives a paper receipt. There are voting machines in use now that do just that. But for some reason, there is a lot of political pressure being applied to resist any legislation to require it. There are bills in Congress to address these problems. H.R. 2239 in the House and S. 1980 in the Senate would establish "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act," which would require all states and counties to use voting mechanisms incorporating a voter verified physical ballot. Oregon's Senators Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden have not endorsed these bills. Mr. Smith's staff member says that the Senator is waiting until later to make up his mind. Mr. Wyden's staff member says that his Senator favors the bill but has not signed on. Congressman Greg Walden's legislative assistant does not know how Mr. Walden feels about the bill. Members of Congress in Oregon's 3rd, 4th, and 5th districts have all endorsed the bill. Oregonians have the advantage of the vote-by-mail procedure, so we are not faced with the problem, at least locally. But surely we can't sit by and watch elections in the rest of the nation be corrupted either by fraud or by undetected error. Oregon is not an independent nation. This is truly a bipartisan issue. The only reasons why someone would oppose a paper-trail for electronic voting machines would be if they had something to hide or something to gain from misleading the voters. At this point there is no indication that Oregon's two senators and Southern Oregon's congressman would actually oppose this legislation, and yet they have not yet endorsed these bills. Ask them why! Time is running out for the 2004 election. More information about electronic voting machines may be obtained from www.verifiedvoting.org Alice Hardesty Ashland DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams