Indeed, these questions are precisely why I (and others) urged Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman to go with an optical scanner system when we went to paperless electronic voting. We got the paperless eSlate instead.

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country "cannot be made secure," according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government's premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Personally, I think we should use a system similar to the "scantron" forms that my students use on tests -- one that is simple, clear, and leaves a paper original that is easy to verify. And the technology is not high-tech at all.

And if we had, I suspect that Nick Lampson would not be headed to Congress from CD22, given that Congresswoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs suffered a huge drop in votes due to the complicated method of casting a write-in vote.

Posted by: Greg at 11:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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