Over at Ars, I give a qualified endorsement to the Holt e-voting reform bill:
Serious concerns were raised regarding the flaws with the printers used to produce paper audit trails. Norris cited a Las Vegas survey in which fewer than 40 percent of voters actually checked the paper record of their vote before leaving the polling place. An election official in North Carolina reported that there were hundreds of printer failures in that state during the 2006 election. He cited a Georgia study about the logistical challenges of storing, tracking, and manually counting thousands of votes recorded on unwieldy rolls of paper tape.
The pleas of state officials for more flexibility in implementing the law’s requirements deserve serious consideration. Some states may have election procedures that match or exceed the rigor of the federal requirements, and it would be foolish to require a state to overhaul its election procedures if the existing procedures are consistent with the spirit of the new federal requirements. Luckily, the Holt bill does give states some options. For example, states are allowed to use auditing procedures other than those spelled out in HR 811, as long as the National Institute for Science and Technology certifies that they will be no less effective.
The concerns about problems with printing and voter-verification are also worth taking seriously, but here states have a simple solution: they can decline to use computerized voting machines entirely. The Holt bill gives states the option of using old-fashioned optical-scan paper ballots, which have been used with few problems for decades. Although some activists have argued for a formal ban on computerized voting machines, the approach of Holt’s legislation gives states more flexibility while avoiding the most serious pitfalls of computerized voting.
Personally, I think my first choice would still be a DRE ban. That would allow the legislation to be a lot simpler, because most of the requirements in the bill are designed to cope with the various weaknesses of DRE-paper hybrids. The Holt bill slightly offends my federalism sensibilities by imposing fairly comprehensive requirements on state election officials.
However, given that a clean DRE ban not on the table, and isn’t likely to be, I think the Holt bill is worth supporting. My guess is that the printers will be such a pain to deal with that states will gradually phase DREs out of their own volition. They can keep a couple of ballot-marking machines around for the use of blind voters.
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