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Hampshire: N.H. Among Few Using Paper in Vote
Records
01.28.04
By RACHEL KONRAD AP
Technology Writer
January 28, 2004, 6:19 PM EST
The technology troubles that could bedevil
elections this year in California, Georgia,
Florida and elsewhere were absent in New Hampshire
this week. That's because it is among the few
states that require a paper record for every
ballot cast.
New Hampshire's relatively low-tech system --
adopted after disasters with both antiquated punch
cards and touch-screen computers -- could become a
nationwide model as scrutiny over electronic
voting grows.
"Maybe people elsewhere trust machines more
than they trust humans, but that would be totally
out of the question here," said Secretary of
State Bill Gardner, one of the longest-serving
elections officials in the country. "I'm
aghast that other places are considering
touch-screen computers."
In 1995, New Hampshire passed a law requiring a
paper record of every ballot cast, effectively
banning touch-screen election computers that don't
produce such receipts. Instead, New Hampshire
voters fill in ovals or connect arrows on paper
ballots or card stock.
Nationwide, though, more than 50,000 touch-screen
voting terminals are being used, and the Pentagon
also is going paperless -- military authorities
announced last week that up to 100,000 Americans
living overseas will vote over the Internet in
November.
About 5,500 people, mostly computer scientists and
voting rights advocates, have put their names to
an online petition warning federal authorities
that voting systems lacking paper records are
"inherently subject to programming error,
equipment malfunction, and malicious
tampering."
Gardner, a Democrat first elected in 1976, is the
only secretary of state to sign the petition,
which was created by Stanford University computer
scientist David Dill.
"New Hampshire may not be perfect," Dill
said. "But if every state were as good as New
Hampshire, we'd be pretty confident in our
elections, and the computer scientists might not
be so up in arms."
Many states, including Maryland, Florida and
Georgia, are installing touch-screen systems to
qualify for millions in matching funds from the
2002 Help America Vote Act, aimed at eliminating
the dangling chad confusion in Florida's 2000
presidential election. In California, nearly 1 in
10 voters cast ballots on paperless touch-screens
in a gubernatorial recall election in October.
The dangers to democracy are clear, computer
scientists and voter security advocates say --
hackers, power failures, downed phone lines, even
conspiracies to alter the vote by insiders at
equipment vendors.
And since most touch-screen terminals lack
traditional printers and don't produce paper
records for every vote cast, thorough recounts are
impossible.
In Keene, N.H., Larry Phillips, 57, said he had no
doubts that workers at his local recreation center
counted his vote for Howard Dean properly in
Tuesday's primary.
"I have confidence in the process, in the
fact that I know the people when I walk into the
polling place, and ultimately in the little
machine the ballot is fed into," said
Phillips, a psychologist. "Maybe New
Hampshire is an anomaly, but I'd suspect people
would want the same confidence wherever they are
in any system they're using."
Slightly more than half the 282,000 ballots from
the state's Democratic and Republican primaries
are counted by optical scan machines, similar to
the method used for SAT exams. Poll workers hand
count about 45 percent of the votes, and all the
ballots are then stored in county lock boxes in
case of a recount.
"There's no hemming and hawing, or saying the
computer ate the ballots," said Leo Pepino,
77, a state representative from Manchester. Pepino
introduced the paper trail bill in 1994, after
paperless Shouptronic computers in the state's
largest city couldn't perform traditional recounts
and a local computer programmer said the machines
were flawed.
Although New Hampshire's last primary recount was
in the 1980s, about 1 in 4 elections statewide are
recounted each year. Poll workers say the process
usually takes only a few days.
"People in other states talk about the
unbelievable burden of recounts," said
Anthony Stevens, New Hampshire's assistant
secretary of state. "They don't realize the
cost of restoring legitimacy is far greater than
the cost of maintaining it."
* __
On the Net:
David Dill's petition: http://verifiedvoting.org
<http://verifiedvoting.org>
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press
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