As if we needed another reason to question the reliability of touch-screen balloting, Cursor noted yesterday that a new analysis of the systems offers more proof of flawed results.
Florida’s touch-screen voting machines performed better in the Nov. 2 presidential election than they did in the March primary, but were still outmatched by older voting devices that use pencil and paper ballots, according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel analysis.
Voters using the ATM-style voting machines in November were 50 percent more likely to cast a flawed ballot or have an unregistered vote in the presidential race, compared to voting machines employing simple paper ballots.
That’s impossible to defend. It also speaks — again — to the need for the touch-screen system to produce some kind of paper trail. It’s obvious in Florida, just as it is in other states using this system. Consider recent events in North Carolina.
The November election may feel like ancient history, but it is still going on in North Carolina. The state has been unable to swear in an agriculture commissioner because a single malfunctioning electronic voting machine lost more ballots than the number of votes that separate the two candidates. The State Board of Elections, the candidates and the public are sharply divided on how to proceed. The mess North Carolina finds itself in is a cautionary tale about the perils of relying on electronic voting that does not produce a paper record.
When the returns came in for the agriculture commissioner race, two things were clear: the Republican, Steve Troxler, and the Democrat, Britt Cobb, were just 2,287 votes apart, and a voting machine in Carteret County had lost 4,438 votes. The machine had mistakenly been set to keep roughly 3,000 votes in its memory, which was not enough. And in a spectacularly poor design decision, it was programmed to let people keep “voting” even when their votes were not being saved.
Now no one knows what’s going to happen, all because of a flawed system, which experts have been warning us about for years, can’t be relied upon. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, despite all of his many faults, recently directed all of the state’s counties to adopt paper-based optical-scan voting systems and abandon the touch-screen system altogether. Let’s hope it’s the start of a trend.