In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Making Votes Count: One Last Election LessonThe November election may feel like ancient history, but it is still going on in North Carolina. The state has been unable to swear in an agriculture commissioner because a single malfunctioning electronic voting machine lost more ballots than the number of votes that separate the two candidates. The State Board of Elections, the candidates and the public are sharply divided on how to proceed. The mess North Carolina finds itself in is a cautionary tale about the perils of relying on electronic voting that does not produce a paper record.
When the returns came in for the agriculture commissioner race, two things were clear: the Republican, Steve Troxler, and the Democrat, Britt Cobb, were just 2,287 votes apart, and a voting machine in Carteret County had lost 4,438 votes. The machine had mistakenly been set to keep roughly 3,000 votes in its memory, which was not enough. And in a spectacularly poor design decision, it was programmed to let people keep "voting" even when their votes were not being saved.
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North Carolina's plight underscores a basic point about elections: because there are often problems, there must be a mechanism for a recount. If the Carteret County voting machine had produced a voter-verified paper record each time a vote was cast, these paper records could have been be counted and the matter would be resolved. But electronic voting machines that do not produce paper records make recounts impossible.
The one positive thing to come out of the agriculture commissioner race fiasco is that it has prompted North Carolina to reconsider its use of paperless electronic voting. As the state ponders the issue, it should look to Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state who did so many things wrong as elections supervisor last year, recently did one very important thing right. He directed all of the state's counties to adopt paper-based optical-scan voting systems. If Carteret County had voted on machines that produced a paper record, North Carolina would not have the constitutional crisis it has now - it would have an agriculture commissioner.
- rob 4:04 PM - [PermaLink] -
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