New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt (D) recently reintroduced the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a bill that would create a national voting standard that would require paper-ballot voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices coupled with routine random audits of electronic voting tallies. “Congress should pass a national standard ensuring that all voters can record their votes on paper and requiring that in every election, randomly selected precincts be audited,” Holt says. In every federal election since 2003, when the Help America Vote Act was enacted, citizen watchdog groups have collected information on voting machine failures. In 2004, the Election Incident Reporting System received more than 4,800 voting machine complaints from all but eight states, and in 2006 a sampling of voting machine problems gathered by election integrity groups and the media exposed more than 1,000 incidents in more than 300 counties in all but 14 states. In 2008, the Our Vote Live hotline received almost 2,000 voting machine problem reports in all but a dozen states, and 19 states conducted completely unauditable elections. Paperless electronic voting is preferred by many election officials, but it is unverifiable and unauditable, and computer scientists say that computers are unreliable without an independent audit mechanism. “The clear trend is towards paper ballots,” says Holt. “In fact, every jurisdiction that has chosen to change its voting system since 2006 has chosen to use paper ballots with optical scan counting. That should be the standard.”
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Tags: Voting
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