Senate Passes Paper Trail
It passed 45-5. It spells the end of touchscreen voting in Iowa, since current equipment can be replaced only with scannable paper ballot systems. That’s good news.
Unfortunately there’s more. The bill allows the new paper trail to be “machine readable” as well as visually readable by real people. This opens the door to misuse of the paper trail, wherein one set of software creates the trail and another set of software reads it. If no one’s eyes are ever employed to examine the paper and compare it to the alleged vote tally, we are hardly better off than we were.
Besides that Rep. Libby Jacobs has filed an amendment to gut the bill when it comes up in the House. She wants to use the ephemeral “electronic ballot image” as the official ballot and ignore the paper trail altogether. Why order the purchase of printers at a cost of a million dollars or more only to ignore the trail they print? The Jacobs amendment is a monkey wrench being thrown into the gears of democracy and an insult to all concerned.