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Utah to Select New Voting Equipment
by Phil Windley
Like many states around the country, Utah relies on punch-card voting systems for much of its voting. The Caltech/MIT Voting Project issued a report that studied election results from over 2700 counties and municipalities in the 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections. The report concluded that of the five general types of election technologies, hand-counted paper ballots, lever machines, punch cards, optically scanned paper ballots, and electronic machines (called direct recording electronics), punch-card machines performed the worst in a baseline measurement of under and over votes. This might lead you to believe that the move away from punch cards to another system is a good thing. I’d agree, so long as we move to something better.
The problem is that what we’re likely to move to, electronic devices, is a close second in terms of over and under votes to punch cards. In fact, punch cards and electronic devices have a 40-70% higher incidence of over and under votes than other methods.
The Utah Elections Office has appointed a commission led by State CIO Val Oveson to select new voting systems. There are already four electronic voting systems approved for use in Utah.
This is dangerous ground and I suspect that most of the choice are being made without much public input or advice from experts in the area. Not because the Elections office is doing something in secret, simply because people don’t pay attention to these things.
I think its vital that Utah adopt, along with California, a requirement that electronic voting systems used in the state support voter verifiable paper trails. The dangers of election mistakes and outright fraud are too great otherwise. If you’d like to know more about this, you might visit Verified Voting.
Posted by windley on March 1, 2004 09:04 AM
