The fiasco of the 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida encouraged 37 states to embrace the touch-screen technology over paper trails. Now, because of Florida again, the Congress is examining a bill that plans to bring the whole country back to the paper age.
Last month, Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse proposed to the Congress a bill that plans to ban touchscreen voting in federal elections starting in 2012.
The senators denounced the lack of reliability of the method, also known as Direct-Recorded Electronic voting, and favored a return to paper-based technologies.
Since 2002, DRE voting has experienced a litany of irregularities. The list of problems includes a great variety of technical problems that caused delays and confusion. Shamefully, it challenged the fairness of election results on several occasions.
At the 2006 general elections, the victory of Republican Vern Buchanan in the 13th Congressional District of Florida by a tiny margin of 369 votes turned into a controversy because 15 percent of the ballots, 18,000, showed no vote.
After this disturbing incident, Florida Gov. Charlie Christ announced the return of paper-trail voting for all elections in Florida, which will take effect in 2008.
Concerns about fraud through DRE voting have also legitimately risen on ethical questions. In 2003, the integrity of Diebold, the main supplier of touch screens, suffered because its chief executive recognized his affinities with the Republicans.
Fraud through electronic voting can also happen from computer processing, said Dr. David Dillman, assistant professor of political science. “I’m not convinced that the electronic voting system is free from attacks,” he said.
Dillman also said he won’t trust electronic voting as long as it doesn’t provide a paper back-up.
But paper-based voting doesn’t mean exclusion of electronic voting. New technologies associate both methods, like optical scanning, which Christ recommended for Florida. In optical scanning, votes are marked on a sheet and then electronically scanned. Its technology permits immediately notifies voters of errors, and officials keep the voting sheets for auditing purposes.
Optical scanning, like touch screens, offers the advantage of allowing disabled people to vote. However, searchers proved that possibilities of attacks also exist during the computer processing.
Both optical-scanning and touch-screen technologies must improve to reach total reliability. Until then, states should favor the safest way for their citizens to vote: paper- trail voting. The Nelson-Whitehouse bill would cost an estimated $1 billion to return to paper. But respecting the right of voters has no price.
