Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Nevada voting system lauded before Congress

WASHINGTON -- Although no new voting technology can be made foolproof to tampering, a system Nevada will employ for its voters this fall comes the closest, experts told Congress Tuesday.

Machinery that relies on software rather than traditional punchcards to record voter ballots can fall victim to error or fraud depending on the training and competence of local operators, they said.

But they said that pairing the electronic machines with printers that spit out a paper audit trail, as Nevada is doing, reduces risks more than anything else on the market.

"A paper trail offers a layer of security with respect to (direct recording electronics)," said Randolph Hite, information technology director with the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress.

"You know the machine is capturing the vote that's on the receipt," said Hite, who unveiled a GAO report on voting machines at a hearing before a House Government Reform subcommittee.

The voting booth technology that combines electronic touch screens with a printer is so new that accuracy statistics do not yet exist, Hite said.

Sanford Morganstein, president of Populex Corp., a firm that works on voting technology, said paper audit trail systems combine the "best of the new" in electronics with the best features of "confidence-building" paper ballots.

About 10,000 election boards oversee more than 193,000 polling places in the nation, according to the GAO.

In 2004, about 29 percent of registered voters will use electronic technology, although so far only Nevadans will have paper verification of their votes.

Nevada is spending $9 million in federal funds to buy 2,000 paper trail voting machines for use starting for the Sept. 7 primary. The money was available from the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which was passed to improve voting systems in the wake of the 2000 election chaos in Florida.