So there is some talk this afternoon of a recount in New Jersey's gubernatorial race. That is ironic, because a meaningful recount in New Jersey is impossible.
Today's four high-profile elections in New Jersey, Maine, Virginia, and New York are an excellent sample of the country's voting technology. And make a strong case for a national standard for verifiable elections. We've come a long way since paperless touch screens seemed about to take over the election business, but we have a long way to go before voting machines become a matter of routine administration and citizen oversight. Verified Voting has a summary of the voting technology used in today's four high-profile races. More on the flip.
Virginia and New Jersey are electing Governors today using unverifiable voting technology. What's more, the voting equipment being used today in these two states has already been rejected by their Legislatures. Maine will vote entirely on voter-marked paper ballots (yay!), but there will be no manual tally sample of electronically counted ballots (boo). In NY-23, most votes will be cast on optically scanned paper ballots, and there will at least be a manual tally audit of 3% of ballot scanners.
In New Jersey, a four-year-old law requiring voter-verifiable paper records is on hold until sufficient state or federal funds are available to upgrade voting systems.
In Virginia, the General Assembly banned the future purchase of direct-recording electronic voting machines back in 2007, so jurisdictions must gradually replace these machines with paper ballots and optical scanners. So far, this is happening only in Fairfax County, where a blend of paper ballots and electronic machines is now used. It needs to happen sooner. Last March, a county Supervisor's election in Fairfax was left with unanswered questions when electronic voting machines gave purely nonsensical numbers.
Maine votes entirely on paper ballots, and according to Verified Voting, a large number are actually hand-counted on election night. A majority will be optically scanned, though, and there is no automatic routine audit. NY-23 will be largely counted by optically scanned paper ballots, with some lever voting. The 3% manual tally law is an excellent start, though improvements are needed.
Update: a commenter points to Washington state's Referendum 71. Most votes in WA are vote by mail, but there is no manual audit of these ballots. Only paper trails left by direct-recording electronic machines (DREs) are subject to manual audit.
We have to do better. I wrote back in December:
"On these machines, voter intent cannot be recovered independently of software in the machines. The ACCURATE Center, a think tank consisting of computer scientists and technologists with an interest in voting technology, summed up the problem (p. 23 of the pdf):
In today’s purely electronic systems, there is no "fixed record" for voters to review, or for officials to review as a check against the system or in the case of a recount. If votes were incorrectly recorded by the system there is no possibility of a meaningful recount.
The inability to perform an effective recount creates vulnerability to small and large-scale error and tampering. As I have written too many times before, the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security concluded that a close statewide election on paperless electronic systems could be manipulated successfully by as few as one to three people. And the mere existence of paper ballots is not enough; systematic and robust hand count audits are necessary after each election.
Contrast that to Minnesota's recount, in which - whatever the controversies about legitimate absentee ballots - there was overwhelming bipartisan consensus about the intent of the voters. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie wrote in July 2009:
Lost in all the hype surrounding the ongoing fight was that in 99.99 percent of the ballots reviewed, the representatives from the two campaigns -- no shrinking violets, I assure you -- agreed with the local election officials' determination of voter intent. In the end, out of 2.92 million ballots cast in the election, only 14 of the ballots were truly disputed. These 14 votes were awarded to the candidates as the result of 3-2 votes by the State Canvassing Board; some of them were awarded to Sen. Norm Coleman and some were awarded to Franken.
It is wrong that ballots can be recounted in one state and not another; we need a national standard for verifiable, recountable voting. Rep. Rush Holt has a bill to require voter-marked paper ballots and random hand counts to check electronic vote tallies: HR 2894, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. The Senate clone is S.1431, sponsored by Bill Nelson of Florida. Both bills will phase out direct-recording electronic voting machines, ban wireless communication by voting systems, and other important reforms. Voting machines that have no "paper trail" printer will have to be gone by November 2010, and voting machines with a paper-trail attachment may be used until 2014.
Click here to send a message to your Senators and Reps in support of HR 2894 and S.1431.
Of all things we talk about in elections, verifying the damn tally should not be this much of a do. Let's try and make today one of the last elections of the era of unverifiable voting.
