The Challenges of Paper Records of Electronic Voting

The Challenges of Paper Records of Electronic Voting

6 September 2006 · No Comments

This New York Times editorial has me thankful that Connecticut is pursuing scantron-style voting in the near future:

Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year’s primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.

Tags: Elections