[Evote-discussion] NY Times Editorial: One Last Election Lesson

[David M Rosenberg]

Another editorial in The New York Times' "Making Votes Count" series
appeared today (18-Jan-2005). All the items in the series are
available at <nytimes.com/makingvotescount>. Today's editorial is at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/opinion/18tues1.html?pagewanted=print

January 18, 2005
MAKING VOTES COUNT 

One Last Election Lesson

The November election may feel like ancient history, but it is still
going on in North Carolina. The state has been unable to swear in an
agriculture commissioner because a single malfunctioning electronic
voting machine lost more ballots than the number of votes that
separate the two candidates. The State Board of Elections, the
candidates and the public are sharply divided on how to proceed. The
mess North Carolina finds itself in is a cautionary tale about the
perils of relying on electronic voting that does not produce a paper
record.

When the returns came in for the agriculture commissioner race, two
things were clear: the Republican, Steve Troxler, and the Democrat,
Britt Cobb, were just 2,287 votes apart, and a voting machine in
Carteret County had lost 4,438 votes. The machine had mistakenly been
set to keep roughly 3,000 votes in its memory, which was not enough.
And in a spectacularly poor design decision, it was programmed to let
people keep "voting" even when their votes were not being saved.

There have been many suggestions for what to do next. The State Board
of Elections initially wanted to have a revote limited to Carteret
County, but a court struck that down. Then it scheduled a new
statewide election, but that, too, was held to be improper. The
elections board, which is bitterly divided along partisan lines, has
been ordered by a judge to try again to find a way to resolve the
election. But no one is predicting it will be easy. "There are
conflicting and little-used statutes and constitutional provisions
that may not be consistent with each other," says Don Wright, the
general counsel of the elections board.

In the meantime, both sides are promoting methods that appear designed
to ensure that their candidate wins. Republicans want to count 1,352
affidavits recently collected by Mr. Troxler from Carteret County
voters saying that they voted for him on the faulty machine. They say
that if the affidavits were counted, it would be mathematically
impossible for Mr. Cobb to win. Democrats say this would violate the
principle of a secret ballot and open up the possibility of voter
coercion. Some of Mr. Cobb's backers argue that the State Constitution
requires that the race be decided by the state legislature, which just
happens to be in Democratic hands.

North Carolina agriculture commissioner may not be the loftiest of
offices. But if the same glitch had occurred in Washington, where
Christine Gregoire was just elected governor by 129 votes, it would
have destabilized the entire state government. If it had occurred in
Florida in 2000, where President Bush's margin was just 537 votes, it
would have undermined an entire presidential election.

North Carolina's plight underscores a basic point about elections:
because there are often problems, there must be a mechanism for a
recount. If the Carteret County voting machine had produced a
voter-verified paper record each time a vote was cast, these paper
records could have been be counted and the matter would be resolved.
But electronic voting machines that do not produce paper records make
recounts impossible.

The one positive thing to come out of the agriculture commissioner
race fiasco is that it has prompted North Carolina to reconsider its
use of paperless electronic voting. As the state ponders the issue, it
should look to Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell, the Ohio secretary of state
who did so many things wrong as elections supervisor last year,
recently did one very important thing right. He directed all of the
state's counties to adopt paper-based optical-scan voting systems. If
Carteret County had voted on machines that produced a paper record,
North Carolina would not have the constitutional crisis it has now -
it would have an agriculture commissioner.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company