April 28, 2004, 1:45 PM — Members of VerifiedVoting.org and Common Cause called Wednesday for the U.S. Congress to move ahead with legislation that would require a verified paper trail for voting, as much of the country moves toward using electronic voting machines.
Representatives of the two groups want Congress to act on the Voter Confidence and Accessibility Act, which would require paper copies of each voter's results when using an electronic voting machine. The paper copies, which voters could see after voting but would not leave the voting area, would be used for vote recounts.
After confusion caused by paper-based ballots in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, Congress in 2002 passed the Help America Vote Act, which requires states to create computerized voter registration databases and replace punch-card and lever voting systems. But Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, said he sponsored the Voter Confidence and Accessibility Act because of concerns that electronic voting systems lack accountability.
"The reason we're doing this is to restore confidence in the system," Holt said at the Wednesday press conference. "You must support this legislation. Otherwise, you have, in effect, outlawed recounts." The bill has 134 co-sponsors in the House and four in the Senate, mostly Democrats.
Some voting-machine vendors and voting officials have opposed paper verified ballots, however. Among the objections: printers can jam or otherwise fail, causing voting machines to go down during elections; and adding printing systems to e-voting machines can be expensive, resulting in delays to e-voting implementations. In the meantime, punch-card systems will continue to leave thousands of votes unrecorded, said Daniel Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University.
"Electronic voting, while not perfect, is the best option out there," Tokaji said during March lunch on e-voting in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). "The net effect is likely to discourage counties from going to electronic machines at all." The ITAA represents several e-voting machine vendors.
Tokaji, a former staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said a paper trail would not have solved a problem in the California counties where voting machines malfunctioned in the March primaries, Tokaji said. Voters there were turned away because the machines were not working, and an unknown number simply never returned to cast their votes.
"I'm in favor of some sort of voter verifiable audit trail, but not of locking in place a particular method ... before it's been fully tested," he said at a second ITAA lunch in California. Some printer systems could cost up to US$1,000 per voting machine, Tokaji said, although VerifiedVoting.org officials disputed that cost.
But Jeremy Epstein, a technology advisor to VerifiedVoting.com and senior director for product security at webMethods Inc., said possibilities of paper jams are small, compared to other potential problems with voting machines. ATMs (automated teller machines) or gas pumps have few problems with their receipt printers, he said.
"I use an ATM fairly often, and I don't see ATMs jamming up very often," he said.
Epstein downplayed ITAA's opposition to paper trails, noting that nearly 1,800 IT workers have signed a petition in support of a verified voting trail. "(ITAA members) aren't interested in correct technology -- they're interested in selling machines," Epstein said.
U.S. election officials shouldn't wait for widespread problems with e-voting machines before allowing a way to check votes against a paper trail, Epstein and other speakers at the Wednesday press conference said. In the November 2003 election in Fairfax County, Virginia, about 1 percent of one candidate's votes were subtracted instead of adding to her total, and with no paper trail, there's no way to know if the problem was fully fixed, Epstein said.
"Subtle problems will remain undetected," he added. "For every problem we catch, there may be hundreds of problems we don't fix."
(James Niccolai in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
