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| New Jersey: A Vote for Optical Scan |
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| By The Times of Trenton | |
| December 15, 2008 | |
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This editorial appeared in The Times of Trenton. Today, the state Legislature is expected to consider a bill to remove the requirement that voting machines produce voter-verified paper records by Jan. 1, 2009, and to replace that re quirement with a pilot program for adding printers to a few of New Jersey's voting machines. If the results of that pilot program prove acceptable, the rest of the state's electronic voting machines will be retrofitted with the printers that would allow voters to see their recorded votes, but would not give them actual paper receipts. All that is expected to take years and cost millions. The intention, to provide paper evidence that a vote is recorded as the voter intends, is admirable. The technology is not. Computer expert Andrew W. Appel of Princeton University has testified that it would take only about seven minutes to hack into the voting machines now in use throughout the state. In fact, adding printing capability to the present equipment would alter it substantially enough to make previous state inspection moot. We would have, in effect, voting machines that are uninspected in addition to being unreliable. We join a broad-based coalition, led by the Coalition for Peace Action, a regional organization based in Princeton, in opposing the bill. We urge the Legislature to, instead, take steps to implement an optical- scan voting system, as so many other states have done. With optical-scan technology, voters mark ballots by hand -- in the manner of taking a standardized test -- and the ballots are then fed into a machine to be read. Not only is the technology reliable, it's also cost-effective. U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-Hopewell Township, in testimony at the hearing last week, reckoned that, "In purchase costs alone, converting to an optical scan system would likely cost no more than adding printer retrofits to New Jersey's existing touch screen machines, and probably less." Holt, who has long been a leader on voting integrity issues in the House of Representatives, summed up the matter nicely when he said: "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." "The national trend is clearly to move away from touch screen voting and towards more reliable, less troublesome optical scan voting systems," Holt testified. "There are only seven states left in the country that, on a statewide basis, use paperless voting systems." New Jersey is still one of them. With the gubernatorial election less than a year away, time is running out. This is a situation that was to have been taken care of years ago. But the deadlines have come and gone, and come and gone again, and New Jersey's citizens still cannot be certain that the votes they cast will be counted and counted correctly. We believe the optical-scan technology would offer the most reliable assurance of that. Comment on This Article
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