the citizen-viewer

The divide between Bev Harris of Black Box Voting and most other groups that oppose all-electronic voting systems continues to widen.

Just as hundreds of people converged on Washington to ask their representatives to co-sponsor Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, Harris's organization released a statement titled Why the Rush Holt bill (H.B. 550) is dangerous. It's causing a bit of a buzz.

Rep. Holt has already posted a response to Harris. Rather than attempt to duplicate his points, I want to take issue with two points raised by Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State, who jumped into the fray with his April 11 analysis, A Remarkable Turn in the Paper Trail Debate.

First the red herring, then the straw man.

The red herring:

"the scant available evidence that exists suggests that few voters actually check the paper record"

I have little doubt that this is true -- when voters think the system is working. However, collective confidence does not require that every voter, or even most voters, check the paper record. If you know that everyone can check, and you've never heard of an error, you might reasonably not bother to check.

But if you've heard tell of incorrect ballots, especially in your voting station, you will become quite likely to check. All it takes is a couple of voters to notice that their paper ballots are incorrect and word will spread very quickly. If the machines are marking ballots improperly in even a small number of cases, the voters will discover this, collectively, and go bananas, properly. It's common sense.

Of course the paper records have to be reasonably easy for voters to read, i.e., not written with secret code numbers or obscure dot patterns. Which brings us to...

The straw man:

"Representative Holt and his allies continue to advance the idea that the VVPAT is a cure-all"

Though I'm in favor of Holt's bill, I certainly don't think it's a cure-all, and I've never gotten the impression that Rep. Holt or his allies have said that it is, or even that they "advance the idea" as Tokaji carefully puts it. However it is by far the best bill on the table right now, and it would be a step forward. There is room for improvement, and there will always be more work needed on the federal, state and local levels.

No law will ever be a substitute for citizen involvement, transparency and vigilance. What HR550 does, with regard to the points above, is put some powers of detection and enforcement in the hands of the citizen-viewers, where they should be.