Under legislation that won initial committee approval Tuesday, all Tennessee voters will eventually mark paper ballots, check them for accuracy and then run them through an "optical scan" voting machine.
This is great news. The article says the bill has cleared one committee but will be held temporarily in the Finance committees until it is known whether Congress will provide funding for replacements. If not, the plan will be to move ahead with state funding.
This is great news and long overdue. It should have been done at the federal level when they passed the HAVA "Help American Voting Machine Vendors" act. We've been waiting seven years for Congress to do something. States are tired of waiting and are now taking matters into their own hands.
(Note that the article has a glaring error regarding "touch screen" systems being used in 93 counties. Touch screens are only used in 17 counties in Tennessee.)
According to this report from Common Cause, Tennessee is one of six states at high risk of having election results affected by electronic voting machine malfunction or tampering.
High Risk States are "states that deploy paperless voting systems that produce no separate independent voter-verifiable paper record of the voters’ marked ballot. In essence, recovery from voting machine malfunction or tampering is very difficult if not impossible."
The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR) is conducting an ongoing study of voting and election systems in Tennessee. The first report on voting machine systems was presented to TACIR in June.
TACIR staff prepared a subsequent report of recommendations for improving Tennessee's election systems, including adoption of voter verified paper audit trails. The report also has results from a survey of county election administrators across the state. This report was presented to TACIR last week. Following are some highlights from the study.
(Also see Joe Powell, who raises some good questions.)
