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PENNSYLVANIA EXPERTS & ELECTION OFFICIALS SIGN NATIONAL LETTER TO OBAMA
"Yes, "We Need to Fix That," But Electronic Voting and Internet Voting is Not the Answer
December 7, 2012 -- Several prominent Pennsylvania computer scientists and election officials have joined a broad national coalition of experts, including congressional representatives, elections officers and cyber-security experts, to sign a letter this week urging the president and Congress to reject any calls for Internet voting and to move to voter-marked paper ballots counted by modern optical scanners.
The letter states that paper ballot based equipment has proven to be effective at avoiding the problems that resulted in long lines in many states and can be meaningfully audited or recounted.
"Approximately 85% of Pennsylvania voters in 50 of our largest counties do not have the basic protection of a voter-marked paper ballot to back up and protect their vote," said VotePA's Executive Director, Marybeth Kuznik, who signed the letter. "The computerized voting machines Pennsylvania purchased under the Help America Vote Act in 2006 will enter their eighth (8th) year of use in 2013. Yes, budgets are tight, but if federal, state, and county officials do not start to plan for replacement now, we will face real problems as these aging voting machines start to fail in the not-too-distant future."
Following delivery to The White House and other officials, the letter was announced yesterday afternoon in a coalition press release.
The press release mentions that after voters across the country waited as long as seven hours to cast their ballots and Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on East Coast election systems last November, lawmakers in Congress are introducing legislation to facilitate the voting process in federal elections, and some parties have expressed Interest in online voting.
"Internet voting seems like a great solution. But relying on the Internet to transmit a vote means not only opening the election up to hackers and malicious forces, but also giving up the right to vote anonymously," said Barbara Simons, former president of the Association for Computing Machinery and chair of the board of the nonpartisan Verified Voting.
Instead, Simons and dozens of other leaders in their fields are urging Congress to use scanned-in paper ballots in federal elections.
"The lack of accountability in our election processes has put our democracy at risk," said Peter Neumann, Principal Scientist of the SRI International Computer Science Lab and Moderator of the ACM Risks Forum. "That's why we urge Congress to adopt scanned paper ballots. They are inexpensive, they can eliminate long lines because many voters can vote simultaneously, and most importantly, they provide a paper trail that can be verified, especially in the event that an election result is called into question."
The letter to the President notes that, had elections been too close to call in the November contest, many jurisdictions that rely on electronic voting machines would have had no way to verify whether their results were correct.
"Pennsylvania is part of that group," adds Kuznik. "Recounts are meaningless on our current paperless voting machines. And if we ever have a real statewide election problem, we'll be in serious trouble without paper ballots that human beings can count."
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About VotePA: We are a statewide alliance dedicated to voting rights and election integrity. As a grassroots citizen group we count registered voters of five different political parties and non-partisan voters among our membership, united by belief in the right of every eligible citizen to vote for candidates of his or her choice and to have every vote counted accurately. We are a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization, as such donations to support our work are not tax-deductible but are very much needed and much appreciated. DONATE