The writer, a Democrat, represents District 25 in the state Senate, where he also is chairman of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee.

There can’t be any doubt left. Maryland voters need a paper trail for touch-screen voting machines. To continue to fail to provide paper verification for the easy to hack e-voting machines is to deny the obvious and be negligent in protecting Maryland elections.

Maryland suffered through the 2004 election and the 2006 primary with machine breakdowns, failure to boot up and freezing and a variety of glitches that have shaken official and public confidence in the reliability of e-voting machines.

In the 2004 presidential election, the Montgomery County Election Board found that 189 voting machines failed and 122 were ‘‘suspect,” based on the number of votes captured.

Maryland’s September 2006 primary voting was a study in foul-ups and flaws that brought national attention to the state. The good news is that the recent November general election saw far fewer foul-ups. According to Linda Schade from the election watchdog group, TrueVoteMD, while there were scattered foul-ups, there were no broad failures, such as those experienced during the primary election.

However, the bad news is that Marylanders do not trust the voting machines to count every vote and make every vote count. It should be pointed out that gubernatorial candidates from both parties urged their supporters to vote by absentee ballot. Further demonstrating this lack of confidence in e-voting, nearly 200,000 Maryland voters requested absentee ballots. Four years ago, Marylanders requested only 66,000 absentee ballots. In Prince George’s County alone voters requested 15,532 absentee ballots for the Nov. 7 election.

A RABA Technologies of Columbia study, commissioned by the Maryland Senate and House of Delegates, backed paper voting receipts as ‘‘absolutely necessary.” Johns Hopkins computer science professor, Avi D. Rubin, called a voter verified paper trail urgently needed because without it, it is impossible to be certain if elections are accurate.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that computerized voting is in the hands of private vendors, such as Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Hart and others, who make the machines. The manufacturers and vendors keep the machine’s computer software secret. There is lax security, with regard to the storage of these machines. It should be pointed out that there is no all-electronic system of vote counting that is safe from glitches. One minor glitch can disenfranchise thousands of voters.

A federal bi-partisan commission has recommended that paper back up for e-voting machines is urgent. In agreement, 27 states have enacted law to provide a paper trail.

It has been estimated that it will cost between $10 million and $20 million to add a voter verified paper trail to Maryland’s 16,000 e-voting machines. As I see it, this is a small price to pay to preserve our democratic system of choosing our elected representatives and the people’s confidence in that system.