Paper Ballots Beat Paper Trails
While New Mexico is dumping touchscreen (DRE) voting machines altogether, we here in Iowa are still battling over whether to add paper trails to our new paperless equipment. But we should be aware that paper trail critics do have some good points. Paper trail technology is an inferior fix for paperless voting machines. It is so much better to use paper ballots from the outset. Here is the case for plain paper ballots argued by Heleni Thayre of Boston.
A Voter Verified Paper Record (VVPR) is not necessarily a true paper ballot. A hand marked paper ballot is the highest quality voting document—the most suitable for reliable audits and recounts. A VVPR produced by an electronic voting machine (DRE) is a secondhand document and may not have been carefully verified. In fact it may not have been verified at all and may not reflect the intent of the voter. It is thus inferior for the purpose of audits and recounts. The VVPR of a DRE may not be of permanent quality paper and thus would NOT constitute a permanent record.
A DRE is one the most inefficient and expensive voting systems available and is subject to documented malfunctions as well. A DRE system requires a computer for every voting booth in a polling place rather than the one machine per precinct needed for a ballot scanner system. It is therefore a very inefficient use of financial resources.
It can also delay voting in the case of machine malfunction and cause long lines at the polls. A ballot scanning machine cannot delay voting since people can continue to fill out paper ballots and put them into a ballot box even if the scanner is not functioning.
In addition a Voter Verified Paper Record does little or nothing to protect against the insecurities of electronic voting machines unless an audit is actually done - regularly and as a matter of course. Computer security experts tell us that software can be so designed that the printer shows one thing while the invisible electronic count is something different.
I guess they understand this is New Mexico. For now in Iowa, the very most we can hope for in places like Centerville, Greenville, Hayesville, and Knoxville and is mere paper trails - visible ones that we can verify. If the Iowa House doesn’t act soon, we won’t even have them.