“Hand counted paper ballot” bill filed

From my inbox, the following is from VoteRescue:

VoteRescue in Austin, Texas is proud to announce the submission yesterday of HB 3894 by Texas Rep. Lon Burnam of Tarrant County, which calls for hand-counted paper ballots, and the elimination of electronic voting systems for our elections in Texas. The exception would be ballot marking machines such as Automark. Our founder, Karen Renick, had a major hand in crafting this bill.

Vote-PADS or Equalivote systems, both non-electronic voting systems, will be recommended for use with the disabled community to fulfill the Help American Vote Act mandate.

More info about the bill is here:

What does H.B. 3894, the Texas Hand-counted Paper Ballot Bill of 2007, do?

1. Repeals the use of any electronic “voting system” from the Texas State Election Code and leaves hand-counted paper ballots as the only voting method allowed by code in Texas.

2. Permits any interested citizen to observe the counting of Election Day and Early Voting ballots.

3. Makes the citizens of Texas the first to know the precinct results by instructing the precinct presiding judge to post them on the front door of the precinct’s polling place.

4. Makes it a felony to remove, tear, deface or in any way alter the posted precinct results for 24 hours after they are publicly posted on the polling place door.

5. Permits a video recording device to record an unobstructed view of the ballots and ballot boxes from the time the polls open for voting until the final precinct totals are posted on the front door of the precinct’s polling place. The video records are stored with the original paper ballots.

6. Reduces the maximum number of registered voters per precinct from 5,000 to 2,000.

7. Allows county election commissions to consider implementing alternate hand-counted paper ballot voting materials and methods to reduce counting times.

The text of the bill can be found here. I have to say, while I think this bill does some good things, I don’t fully support it. I disagree with the conclusion that adding printers to electronic voting machines is insufficient. Among other things, as we learned from the Florida debacle of 2000, paper ballots in and of themselves are no guarantors of accurate vote counting.

What could overvotes yield, anyway? If a ballot is marked for two candidates, it’s irretrievably spoiled, right? True, some people–including Bush lawyers seeking to discredit an “undervote-only” recount–raised the possibility that some overvotes might be salvageable if, say, voters actually wrote “I want Bush” on their ballots. But this possibility seemed almost theoretical. “There’s nothing in the record that suggests there are such votes,” Gore attorney David Boies asserted confidently when asked about the possibility in oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court.

We now know how wildly off-base Boies was.

We know because in Lake County the Sentinel examined 3,114 overvotes. And one-fifth of them contained exactly the “write-in mistake” that Boies had dismissed as nonexistent. More perversely, the majority (376) of these ballots were clear votes for … Boies’ client, Gore. “In each case, an oval next to his name was filled in with a pencil and the voter mistakenly filled in another oval next to a spot reserved for write-in candidates, writing in Gore’s name or running mate Joe Lieberman’s there as well,” the Sentinel reports. Some 246 ballots contained the same Write-In Mistake, except that the voter both marked and wrote in “Bush.” But, all told, Gore would have gained 130 votes in this one measly little county had its overvotes been manually tallied.

These were paper ballots, filled in with a pencil. Now, they were rejected by an optical scanner, whereas Burnam’s bill would allow for people counters, but that doesn’t mean those votes would have counted. Something like that will always be up to somebody’s judgment, and that always leaves room for disagreement. I for one believe the incidence of spoiled ballots will go up under this bill, and that isn’t going to achieve the end it has in mind.

But at a more fundamental level, I refuse to accept the notion that electronic voting machines, especially ones that output a paper ballot, cannot be made to be sufficiently secure. Go back and read my interview with Dan Wallach. We know what we need to do, we just need to do it. If we can trust ATMs, we should be able to trust EVMs. It’s a crime that we can’t trust what we have right now, but this is not an intractable problem.

Further, to expand on the point about spoiled ballots, I believe electronic machines can and will present a better user experience. One clear advantage that the eSlate machines have over paper and pencil is that once I’ve made all my selections, I get to see a screen that shows me every choice I’ve made, plus every race in which I’ve declined to make a choice. It’s trivially easy to see if I’ve goofed by picking the wrong person or skipping a name I meant to vote for. I don’t believe it would be this easy to detect a mis-filled bubble on a paper ballot – it certainly would not be as quick – and I fear that the people tasked with counting hundreds or thousands of paper ballots would make mistakes, too. Improving the technology we have, and improving the processes that we have to implement and use that technology, is the answer, not abandoning it altogether.

Be that as it may, whatever you think of this, the Elections Committee is meeting today from 2 to 4 PM in room E2.028, though I don’t see this bill on the hearing notice. For more information, visit VoteRescue.org.

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