Three and a half years after New Jersey's Legislature enacted a law to require voter-verified paper records, the Legislature is poised to undo it. After 37 states have managed to take concrete steps toward transparent and verifiable elections, New Jersey has not gotten the job done.
New Jersey Kossacks, click here to take action and send a message to New Jersey lawmakers. That's New Jersey folks only, please.
Yesterday I wrote about bills moving in the Legislature to undo the three-year-old requirement for voter-verifiable paper records.
Now it looks like the state Senate could vote as early as Monday. New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt spoke eloquently today at a hearing of the Senate State Government Committee.
Here are excerpts from Holt's testimony (emphasis added):
First, as you know, I am a physicist, and so I am not arguing in favor of paper-ballot-based voting out of some fear or lack of understanding of the technology we vote on. Second, the original group of experts who helped me draft my legislation when I first introduced it in Congress in 2003 were computer security experts – among the best and most highly-credentialed computer security experts in the country. Therefore, I would also like to think it is obvious that the driving force behind my legislation is not a lack of understanding of computer security risks, but rather a long experience and familiarity with computers, computer security and computer experts. And finally, as you may recall, I have personally experienced human error in vote counting: in my very first run for the seat I now hold, one of the county clerks in my district ascribed my vote totals to my opponent, and newspapers reported that I had lost the race. In fact, you might even say it runs in my family, because my own father was the apparent victim of the theft of paper ballots when he ran for office. So I am not operating under the assumption that human beings are automatically more reliable than computers, nor that paper ballots are fraud-proof and computer tallies are not. The point is – voting must not be an act of faith, it must be an act of record, and independent audit records (voter verified paper ballots) must be required...
...New Jersey enacted such a requirement [voter-verified paper records] in 2005. But inexplicably, although more than half of the country has succeeded in implementing such requirements since I first commenced this effort in 2003, New Jersey – once a national leader – is slow to act...
...Based on what other states are doing, New Jersey could certainly have implemented its paper record requirement as of the original implementation date of January 2008. And it could and should do so now, without further delay.
Amen. New Jersey Kossacks, take action.
