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Electronic Votes Need Paper Trail

By a vote of 2-1, the County Commissioners voted Aug. 23 to purchase 92 used electronic voting machines of a type that do not provide a verifiable paper trail, thus disregarding wholesale revelations over the past three years of numerous incidents of breakdowns that cannot be corrected and the relative ease of preprogramming or hacking the software in a manner that would alter the results.

Had Commissioners Shellenberger and Shaub performed a Google search under "electronic voting paper trail" they would have found ten pages of articles explaining the unreliability and danger of electronic voting machine without verifiable paper trails. The State of California was the first to ban their use.

Fortune Magazine called electronic voting without a verifiable paper trail "The worst idea of the year."

The New York Times editorialized "It is not hard to program a computer to steal an election... The answer to all these questions is a 'voter verified paper trail', a paper record that the voter can check for accuracy. This paper will guard against computer tampering by creating a hard copy of votes that can be compared that can be compared to the electronic results in a recount."

Recently Common Cause declared: "All voting systems must have a voter-verified paper ballot that is the official ballot for purposes of recounts and audits."

What makes commissioners Shellenberger's and Shaub's votes for this disastrous purchase all the harder to understand were the published assurances by county officials over the past year that any electronic voting machines purchased would have verifiable paper trails. The public only had the opportunity to know of the change of policy a couple of days before the purchase was approved!

It is not too late for the commissioners to correct their folly. Even if the county has to pay for the machines, it should not take delivery. Better to waste $113,000 than to undermine the foundation of democracy - accurate counting of votes - and thus create public uncertainty about the legitimate outcome of all future election results.