Tarrant County Dems Attack Electronic Voting

Several weeks ago, the Tarrant County Democratic Party asked Secretary of State Roger Williams to overturn a ruling by one of his underlings, that prevents Tarrant County from adding voter-verifiable paper receipts to its electronic voting machines. Tarrant County Democratic Chairman Art Brender said, "I think it is essential that we provide the people of Tarrant County assurance that their vote will be counted."

But after waiting weeks for an answer from Williams, Tarrant County Democrats are getting ready to take action. Brender says the Democrats will file suit in federal court to have the paperless electronic machines declared unconstitutional, if Williams delays any longer or rejects the party's request. In a case from the 2000 election, the Supreme Court decided that it is unconstitutional for a state to use different methods to recount votes in different juristictions. Since Texas uses paper ballots in some counties and paperless e-voting in others, they say this prevents uniformity in the recounting of votes.

A couple of weeks ago, a case against the electronic voting machines was filed in state court in Travis County, but if the Tarrant County Democrats follow through, this would be the first Texas case opposing e-voting that is in the federal court system.

I applaud these actions by Tarrant County Democrats, and I hope they do follow through with a federal court case. It's not as if we haven't already seen problems here in Tarrant County with e-voting. During the primaries last March, these electronic machines counted many votes multiple times and we ended up with an extra 100,000 votes on election night. This is not a small number. 100,000 extra votes can skew an election in even the biggest counties.

I know the old system of hand-counting paper ballots was tedious and time consuming. In the past, I have been an election worker and been a part of the vote-counting that stretched into the early morning. But however arduous and tiring the counting was, when we finished we were confident in the final result, and the result could be recounted as many times as neccessary while all interested parties watched. This ability to recount the ballots at will, inspired confidence in the accuracy and fairness of the election.

None of this is true with the electronic voting. Since the count is done electronically, that is how the recount also must be done. How can we expect the machine to produce a different result in the recount, no matter how wrong the first count was? In all likelyhood, the retabulation would repeat the same mistakes, and since there is no paper trail, the ballots could not be hand-recounted. I know that since the primary vote fiasco, I no longer trust Tarrant County's system to accurately tabulate the votes.

How can anyone trust a system that has demonstrated it is prone to mistakes, that can easily be infected with a virus, that can be easily subverted by only one or two workers, and that cannot be checked for accuracy using a paper trail? This system can be used to cheat too easily. Personally, I'd like to see America return to using only paper ballots. We would have to wait until the wee hours of the morning to know who had won some races, but we would have more confidence that the winner really did win.