In his latest column for The Hill, The American Enterprise Institute’s John Fortier has a critique of the Holt bill that I found rather frustrating:
Election administrators have weighed in with a dose of reality. There is no way to implement nationwide paper trails by the 2008 elections, nor by 2010. House leaders have floated a compromise to delay implementation, but to require simple cash register-style paper trails in 2008. This also will not work.
The expedited timeline for these changes is driven by activists who are convinced that manufacturers like Diebold or clever hackers are likely to commit massive voter fraud. Some have even come to the position of opposing electronic voting machines altogether, even those with paper trails. They now advocate for voting on paper alone, counted by hand. While this might work in some parliamentary systems, where voters cast a single vote on a ballot, try counting ballots by hand in California, with 20 offices up for election and 20 more referenda. And paper ballots are also susceptible to fraud through ballot-stuffing or lost or defaced paper ballots.
What is needed is a modest push for paper trails, with flexibility for states and federal money to help states move in that direction over a six-year period.
This modest approach will not please those who now favor voting only on paper. One request: If you have comments about this column, no e-mails, please–write to me on paper.
The critique of paper ballots here is breathtakingly inane. Hardly anyone is opposing the use of optical-scan machines to count paper ballots marked by voters, because the results of optical-scan ballot counting machines can always be verified with a hand recount. And of course, the retort in that final sentence is a complete non-sequitur.
Like virtually all defenses of e-voting I’ve seen, the piece does not even mention, much less respond to, the substance of the anti-e-voting argument. Fortier’s argument, if we can call it that, is limited to portraying us “activists” as paranoid luddites who are just opposed to technological progress. That ignores the fact that the critics of e-voting include a significant number of computer science professors and a whole lot of computer programmers. These are not people with a knee-jerk opposition to technology, as such. Rather, they are people who understand the limits of technology well enough to know that touch-screen voting is a bad idea.
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