Reply #2: Note similarity in wording: WHO is writing these responses?

[BevHarris]

And who is making financial contributions to these organizations?

http://www.lwv.org/where/promoting/votingrights_hava_drevm.html

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It has been suggested that DRE machines are inherently subject to fraud unless there is an individual paper record of each vote. This seems extreme. DREs are extremely sophisticated machines and most DREs store information in multiple formats and in multiple places within its program. To tamper with a DRE someone would need to know each and every format and storage capacity and be able to manipulate it undetected. Additionally, it must be remembered that DREs are not an election system unto themselves; they are simply an instrument within a complex election system. The key is to design an overall system that builds in multiple checks making it improbable that the system will be tampered with.

The LWVUS does support an individual audit capacity for the purposes of recounts and authentication of elections for all voting systems, including, but not limited to, DREs. The LWVUS does not believe that an individual paper confirmation for each ballot is required to achieve those goals; in fact this is unnecessary and can be counterproductive. An individual paper confirmation for each ballot would undermine disability access requirements, raise costs, and slow down the purchase or lease of machines that might be needed to replace machines that don't work. Simply because a voter verifies their vote on a piece of paper does not guarantee the same results have been be recorded within the machine and vice versa. And why would we assume that, if the total from a paper count and the total from a machine count are different, the paper count is accurate? Is it not just as easy to tamper with an election by "losing" a couple of paper ballots or miscounting them during a recount? And what about the number of ballots involved? In Florida, in the 2000 presidential election, nearly 6 million votes were cast. Do we really believe that recounting that many paper ballots is more accurate than using certified electronic equipment?
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Which sounds a lot like what the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has put out:

http://www.electionline.org/site/docs/pdf/lccr_analysis_-_voter_verification.pdf

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Fact: Security and Reliability Concerns With DRE Machines Have Been Exaggerated
DREs are highly sophisticated, with most of them storing ballot records in multiple formats and in multiple locations. Furthermore, DREs are already required under federal law to create records that can be audited, and most machines currently provide not only the total vote tallies but also a record of how each individual ballot was cast. In many cases, like the machines used in Georgia, DREs produce 3 records of the vote: the official count, a backup count on a separate chip, and a paper record printed out once polls close. In order to rig a DRE, an individual would need to be intimately familiar with its software, gain access to it long enough to change its code, conceal the changes during pre- and postelection testing, and do this on enough machines to actually alter the outcome of an election. While such rigging is possible in theory, in practice it is highly improbable – in fact, in practice, it would be far easier to simply “lose” paper ballots.
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Thanks to DUer junkdrawer for contributing these.

Bev Harris