"It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."
Adam Cohen has a column in Sunday's New York Times, Making Votes Count: Editorial Observer: The Results Are in and the Winner Is . . . or Maybe Not. It discusses the 2002 Senate races in Georgia and Nebraska and their "mythic status" among those complaining about electronic voting machines.
A healthy democracy must avoid even the appearance of corruption. The Georgia and Nebraska elections fail this test. Once voting software is certified, it should not be changed -- not eight times, not once. A backup voting method should be available, so if electronic machines fail or are compromised shortly before an election, they can be dropped.
Votes must be counted by people universally perceived as impartial. States should not buy machines from companies that have ties to political parties, and recent company executives should not be running for elections on those machines.
And every voter should see a paper receipt. This "voter-verified paper trail" should be retained, and made available for recounts -- a low-tech check on the reliability of electronic voting. Most Americans would not do business with a bank that refused to provide written statements or A.T.M. receipts. We should be no less demanding at the polls.
After all, as Tom Stoppard has observed, "It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting."
In Saturday's NYT, the news columns carried this story:
Millions of voters in 10 states will cast ballots on Tuesday in the single biggest test so far of new touchscreen voting machines that have been billed as one of the best answers to the Florida election debacle of 2000. But many computer security experts worry that the machines could allow democracy to be hacked.
Here in Georgia, along with Maryland and California, an estimated six million people will be using machines from Diebold Election Systems, which has been the focus of the biggest controversy.
Independent studies have found flaws in Diebold's system that researchers say might allow hackers or corrupt insiders to reprogram the touchscreens or computers that tally the votes, without leaving a trace.
Without a paper record of every vote or some other way to verify voters' choices after the fact, these experts warn, elections may lose the public's trust. -- Electronic Vote Faces Big Test of Its Security (New York Times)