- Sep 26, 2000
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2...tingoutevotingmachines
Voting Out E-Voting Machines
is hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle - which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World - electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning - as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended."
After the initial excitement, it didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all. (It didn't help that the main touch-screen machine supplier, Diebold, was widely accused in 2004 of ties to the Republican Party.) Fifteen Florida counties adopted touch-screen as well, and they learned the pitfalls of it the hard way, dealing with controversies like a 2006 congressional race in the Sarasota district, where an astonishing 15% of the ballots cast registered no choice at all - in a race that was decided by a razor-thin margin of 386 votes
Of ALL the Republican screw-ups the last 7 years this was the worst.
The electoral process MUST have the full faith and confidence of Americans.
Voting Out E-Voting Machines
is hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle - which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World - electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning - as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended."
After the initial excitement, it didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all. (It didn't help that the main touch-screen machine supplier, Diebold, was widely accused in 2004 of ties to the Republican Party.) Fifteen Florida counties adopted touch-screen as well, and they learned the pitfalls of it the hard way, dealing with controversies like a 2006 congressional race in the Sarasota district, where an astonishing 15% of the ballots cast registered no choice at all - in a race that was decided by a razor-thin margin of 386 votes
Of ALL the Republican screw-ups the last 7 years this was the worst.
The electoral process MUST have the full faith and confidence of Americans.