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Tennessee's leading newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, followed up yesterday's excellent op-ed piece with today's editorial endorsement for voter-verified paper ballots. This editorial WILL make a difference in our effort to accomplish VVPB in the Orange State. Here is the editorial, reprinted with permission by the Tennessean editors.
If you're waiting on the Orange State to protect our votes, you're backing up. Peace out. Fly by night
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A vote that can be verified
Many Tennessee counties are about to spend millions of dollars to purchase voting equipment. Officials have a duty to ensure that the new machines will be reliable.
The 2002 Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, requires that all states address any problems with voting equipment, voter rolls and access to voters with disabilities by this year's election. With the primary in August, that means the Tennessee counties that are replacing voting machines have a short timetable to select equipment, install it and train their election workers. The state has received $55 million in federal funds to update voting equipment and procedures.
A grass-roots group Safe Vote Tennessee is urging counties to purchase equipment using Voter Verifiable Paper Ballots, or VVPB, instead of touch-screen machines. These electronic machines allow the voter to manually mark a ballot that is then read by an optical scanner.
Several states have passed laws requiring voting equipment that produces a paper record. In Tennessee Rep. Gary Moore and Sen. Joe Haynes are sponsoring a bill that would impose a similar requirement. The Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, recommended that Congress pass a law requiring voter-verifiable paper audit trails on all electronic voting machines.
State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson says that touch-screen voting machines are reliable. In most cases, that's probably true. Yet when a technology glitch does occur with computerized voting equipment, it's a lulu. In an election in Texas this month, computerized equipment lost 100,000 votes of some 150,000 cast.
The botched 2000 president election and the subsequent passage of HAVA forced this nation and its experts in voting technology into a thorough search for the voting equipment that was the most reliable. The growing consensus among those experts is that equipment that produces a verifiable paper trail is the safest way to go. Given the stakes, why wouldn't Tennessee go with the system with the least possibility of mistakes and the means to audit votes if a problem does occur?
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