Reply #16: Tennessee: A Vote That Can be Verified [View All]

[livvy]

Tennessee: A Vote That Can Be Verified
by Opinion, The Tennesseean
March 30th, 2006

Many Tennessee counties are about to spend millions of dollars to purchase voting equipment. Officials have a duty to ensure that the new machines will be reliable.



A grass-roots group Safe Vote Tennessee is urging counties to purchase equipment using Voter Verifiable Paper Ballots, or VVPB, instead of touch-screen machines. These electronic machines allow the voter to manually mark a ballot that is then read by an optical scanner.



State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson says that touch-screen voting machines are reliable. In most cases, that's probably true. Yet when a technology glitch does occur with computerized voting equipment, it's a lulu. In an election in Texas this month, computerized equipment lost 100,000 votes of some 150,000 cast.

The botched 2000 president election and the subsequent passage of HAVA forced this nation and its experts in voting technology into a thorough search for the voting equipment that was the most reliable. The growing consensus among those experts is that equipment that produces a verifiable paper trail is the safest way to go. Given the stakes, why wouldn't Tennessee go with the system with the least possibility of mistakes and the means to audit votes if a problem does occur?



http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6347