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Election Perfection: Paper Trails Make Smooth Sails |
Bay Weekly
Volume 14, Issue 4 ~ January 26 - February 1, 2006
With Maryland’s most exciting and consequential election in many years
just around the corner, we ought to do everything possible to make sure
people have confidence in how their votes get counted.
The General Assembly can instill flagging trust in the election process
by approving legislation that requires a paper trail in electronic
voting.
We know a lot of Marylanders who lost faith in the ballot box after
Florida’s vote-counting debacle in 2000. Four years later, shenanigans
in Ohio, where the presidential election was decided, did little to
restore confidence. Our own legislature is polarized about whether new
rules on when and where to vote opens the door to fraud. Nationwide,
confidence in the integrity of the vote is so low that the two- three-
or four-time-voter has gained the power of an urban legend.
(With votes so valuable, we can’t understand why more people don’t use the one they’ve got.)
The hanging-chad mess in Florida triggered a movement to rid voting booths of punch-card voting, which we applauded.
Then suspicions were aroused when a top executive for Diebold, Inc. —
the company that makes electronic voting machines used in Maryland and
many states — wrote a fundraising letter vowing to help George W. Bush
win the election. What were people to think?
Fear of unscrupulous vendors or of computer hackers undermining
elections pushes the nationwide movement demanding paper trails in
electronic voting. Thus far, 26 states have either passed laws or
issued administrative orders requiring paper verification.
Unfortunately, Maryland is not among them.
That’s why we’re hoping the General Assembly wastes no time approving
legislation requiring a paper record from electronic voting machines.
Using technology now available, the machines would print what amounts
to a receipt enabling voters to see in black and white how they voted.
You couldn’t take the receipt with you. Why? Because it would encourage
vote-buying by street-corner partisans offering, say, $10 for proof
that you supported their candidate or cause.
But those receipts would be locked up as old-fashioned proof that we
aren’t tricked by 21st century electronic gadgets or the people who
programmed them.
If the past is any guide, skeptics will point to the infallibility of
computers or the cost of making them spit out paper. Nonsense.
At a time when our country invests heavily in democracy around the
world, we shouldn’t stint on making sure that ours at home works as
smoothly as possible.
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