We need a reliable voting system

Letter to the Editor, Express-Times.com, January 16, 2008

By ALAN BRAU

Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.

Northampton County is poised to pick another voting system after the failure of Advanced Voting Solutions to pass certification. Like many of you, I prefer the old lever machines, but those machines do not meet the standards of the 2002 Help America Vote Act for federal races and must be retired. The options available to Northampton County are touch screen direct recording electronic machines, paper ballots counted by optical scan and paper ballots counted by hand.

Touch screen DREs -- such as the disqualified AVS system that Northampton County purchased and then had to abandon -- do not provide any paper record of one's vote, making election fraud simple and undetectable. There is evidence that touch screens have dramatically changed elections elsewhere in the country, but it is difficult to know that for certain, since there is nothing to check or audit after the election.

The software on these voting machines is written by some disreputable types; Diebold's original GEMS software was written by a felon, Jeffrey Dean, convicted of embezzlement, while in prison. The actual software code for all machines is secret and unavailable to public officials. There is no way to know how these machines tabulate the votes. It is a matter of trust that the programmers are honest.

Because of the unverifiability of these DREs, other states, including California and Florida, have outlawed them. There is pending litigation in Pennsylvania to prohibit paperless touch screen machines from elections.

Whatever voting system is used, verifiable accuracy, ballot security and chain of custody are of primary importance. Hand-counted paper ballots are the best way to achieve these goals. They are the least expensive and most accurate. In addition, all of the money spent on hand-counted paper ballots is kept in our own local economy, instead of spent on foreign-made equipment and out-of-state software.

Realistically, hand-counting won't be accepted by the elections department or county government because of concerns about time and labor in counting by hand.

This leaves us with optically scanned paper ballots. Using a system of optical scanners, the paper ballot is filled out by the voter then fed into the scanner, which records the votes. Although the computerized scanner can be misprogrammed or hacked, there exists the voter-completed paper ballot to memorialize the voter's intent, which can be re-counted after the election. More important, a statistical sampling of paper ballots can be checked as part of the vote-counting process to ensure the accuracy of the optical scan machines.

On Thursday evening, Northampton County Council will make its decision about a new voting system. Will the council make the same mistake twice by choosing another touch screen system? Will the county waste another $2 million for a system that may soon be outlawed?

Call or meet with your elected county officials and tell them you want to have confidence in your election results. We all trust our local elections officials, but we shouldn't be forced to trust unknown programmers or anyone else who might have access to the machines.

With paper ballots, we can verify the results. Without paper, it's faith-based voting.

Alan Brau is a physician and a member of the Coalition for Voting Integrity. He lives in Hanover Township.

URL: http://www.pennlive.com/letters/expresstimes/index.ssf?/base/news-3/1200459944216420.xml&coll=2