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New voting system supported |
Research group, politicians agree voters need verifiable paper
trail
By Sumathi Reddy and Melissa Harris
Baltimore Sun reporters
Baltimore Sun, December 2, 2006
[link
to article]
Legislative leaders say they support overhauling the state's electronic
touch-screen machines when the General Assembly convenes next month, an
effort that comes in the wake of a draft federal report that condemns
paperless voting systems.
Although voting in last month's election in Maryland went off without
major glitches, widespread problems in the September primary and in
other states trouble those seeking change.
Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said yesterday that the
legislature will work to provide a system with a verifiable paper
record of their votes by the next election. Miller, a Democrat, was
viewed as the main obstacle to a bill that didn't pass this year.
But with more time before the next election, Miller said he supports
exploring a change - whether by switching to optical-scan machines or
adding a voter-verified paper printout to the current electronic
machines.
"We have two years until the next election," Miller said. "So what I
hope to do, in conjunction with the [House] speaker, is put together a
group to make recommendations to the General Assembly to come up with
some verifiable trail that will serve us."
House Speaker Michael E. Busch echoed Miller's sentiments. He said he
expects voters to clamor for a verifiable paper trail or some other
means to do manual recounts, and he expects action before the next
presidential election in 2008.
"The general public wants some substantive, verifiable trail," Busch
said. "They want to be able to track the votes."
Rick Abbruzzese, a spokesman for Gov.-elect Martin O'Malley, said a
transition team work group will explore election issues, including the
state's voting machines. It will be headed by former Secretary of State
John T. Willis.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a nonpartisan
research center, issued a draft report this week that concluded that
paperless voting machines are not secure, and it endorsed optical-scan
machines, which use paper ballots that are counted by running them
through a scanner. The report said systems that use software to provide
a paper record of votes that were cast are unreliable.
The report's recommendations will be considered by the U.S. Election
Assistance Commission, which is charged with drafting guidelines for
the nation's voting systems. Michael Newman, a spokesman for NIST, said
the election commission guidelines wouldn't go into effect until 2008
or 2009, at the earliest. Eventually the federal commission's new
standards would determine whether Maryland's voting equipment is
acceptable.
Shazia Anwar, executive director of TrueVoteMD, which opposes
electronic voting, called the NIST recommendations a "step forward" and
an "opportunity for a very credible organization to talk about security
flaws." She said the state might have to scrap its Diebold Election
Systems equipment and purchase optical-scan machines, "particularly if
you look at the costs of adding printers" to the electronic machines.
Just adding a paper trail to the state's voting equipment would not
enable Maryland voters to walk out of their precinct with a receipt
like they do at an ATM. In some places with electronic machines, a
paper receipt of their vote is printed and appears behind a piece of
glass next to the touch-screen for the voter to review.
Gilles W. Burger, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said that
though Maryland's voting equipment can and should be improved - by
adding a paper trail, for instance - he doesn't "want to jettison the
system" at this point, given the cost and stress of starting from
scratch.
"We want to do the most common-sense changes, improvements that make
our system more reliable," he said.
Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Aviel Rubin said he was
"thrilled" with the NIST recommendations. "You need the ability to
count ballots in a way that's independent of software," he said.
"Software is always vulnerable to bugs and to undetectable rigging."
But Rubin said he doesn't expect the federal election commission to
adopt the recommendations. "The EAC has been very neutral on paper, and
I don't see that changing," he said.
Still, he said the fact that a group with such credibility issued such
a sweeping statement should have a positive impact on local
jurisdictions exploring moving to optical-scan machines.
"I think this will carry a lot of weight with a lot of people," said
Rubin. "The pressure in a lot of jurisdictions will be to adopt paper
because of this report."
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