OpEd to the Salisbury Daily Times
Shelton Lankford

(Italics) ... a ballot is... not merely a piece of paper it is me...it
is my voice. Each of us should guard it more than we would our most
prized or precious possession. That ballot protects our other
possessions. Without it you have no say. - Andy Stephenson - Voting
Rights Activist (end Italics)

The battle over electronic voting goes on, not making headlines in the
media. On one side are activists - ordinary people - who are alarmed at
the degree to which reported results of elections in the United States
no longer seem to have much relationship to how people in exit polls
say they voted. On the other side, corporations vie for the attention
of Secretaries of State or State Boards of Election and a share of the
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) money being thrown at the superficially
simple task of counting our votes. Most people go about their daily
lives, not thinking about it at all.  When election day comes, they may
if they remember, go down to a polling place and poke a finger at a
touch-screen, and forget about it for two more years. They look at the
evening news and may be surprised, pleased, or disappointed at the
reported results.  They may see people out protesting and wonder what
the fuss is about. The people on the TV screens are reassuring, and can
even recite a list of reasons why the election turned out the way it
did.

This media-inspired complacency ignores the fact that in Maryland, and
many other states, "ballots" are no longer physical objects. They are
abstractions - one's and zero's - residing in a computer's memory, or
in several computers' memories, where they are aggregated to get a
result.  The companies who make vote-counting equipment - many of whom
also produce automated teller machines (ATM's) for banks, exhibit a
curious antipathy to paper applied to voting.  When you use an ATM,
they just assume you want a receipt of some kind and most have a camera
recording the time and the face of users, plus they spit out a piece of
paper that reflects the transaction, not to mention the money
associated with it. Paper could provide an independent, recountable
record of transactions in which voters deposit the only political
capital they have.
Giving the impression that they regard this as a minor issue, the State
of Maryland's web site provides the following information:

Q: Does the new voting system have a paper trail?
A: Yes. Each voting unit prints a report before the polls open
confirming that there are no votes on the voting unit. After the polls
close, another report is printed showing the results from that voting
unit. Additionally, in case of a recount, ballot images can be printed
from the election database. These ballot images can be manually
recounted without being attributable to any particular voter.

The voting system does not, however, provide a voter-verified paper
trail....

These ballot images that can be printed from a computer memory are
equivalent to asking the machine to show results on the screen twice to
see if they match - worthless as a check and balance.  A better
question would be "does the ...voting system have way for the voter to
verify that his vote was recorded correctly and not discarded, or
worse, changed to the reverse of his intentions, and is the vote
recorded in a manner that would permit a recount should the voting
machine malfunction?"
The answer is no. Activists in Maryland have been advocating for a
voter-verified paper ballot to be produced so the voter can check the
results of his vote. The piece of paper thus produced is presented for
inspection of the voter, and, after inspection, and automatically
deposited into a secure container, where, if needed, it can be
hand-counted and checked against the machine memory. This position is
actually a compromise based on the assumption that Maryland, having
blown over $55 million on highly questionable technology, won't go back
to paper ballots, hand-counted - the first choice- or optically scanned
paper ballots. More information can be found at
http://www.truevotemd.org/

After the 2004 elections, alarmed by problems being reported from Ohio,
John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, went
to Ohio to hear first-hand accounts of some of those problems. There
were accounts of disenfranchisement, long waits at polling places, and
voter registrations gone missing.  John Conyers' report on Ohio is
available at: http://www.democrats.org/a/2005/06/democracy_at_ri.php

This report has been ignored by the mainstream media and there is no
evidence that any reforms are being even considered.
There is a feeding frenzy in the voting machine industry, trying
everything they can to influence Secretaries of State and other
officials to purchase their technology to do something that every kid
that has ever belonged to a club understands intuitively when something
needs to be decided - voting, and counting the votes.

The critics of the e-voting skeptics say we are paranoid, and besides,
election fraud and cheating has always been with us.  They point to
Chicago and allegations that the Daley machine delivered the presidency
to John F. Kennedy in 1960. I don't question that abuses have occurred
in the past. My problem is that machines have introduced a voting
system that is completely opaque to the electorate - even to the
election officials, renders recounts meaningless, and hands over the
beating heart of our democracy to a few private corporations.

Thomas Jefferson must be watching in abject horror.

Shelton Lankford is Organizer of Salisbury Democracy for America, which
produces the PAC-14 show "BackTalk".