E-Voting not up to snuff

According to a new report out of the Brennan Center for Justice, many states are not well prepared to secure the vote on November 4th.

The report, entitled “Is America Ready to Vote?” was released by Common Cause and Verified Voting. The report issues a 50-State report card that grades each state on its preparedness for election system breakdowns and to ensure the accuracy of votes over electronic voting machines. 10 states received inadequate grades in 3 out of 4 categories of safeguards.

“Our elections are so complex and involve so many jurisdictions, technologies, voters, poll workers, technicians and election workers that some concerns are inevitable. As the machinery of our democracy becomes more complicated, however, the opportunity for error increases – and we should be prepared.” – Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting Foundation.

The report evaluated each state on four areas:

• procedures for issuing emergency paper ballots
• reconciling ballot tallies
• providing paper records of votes cast
• post-election audits.

Currently 24 states use voting machines. Of those states, 8 have no guidance on stocking emergency paper ballots at the polls in case the voting machines break down. This could mean that voters will not be able to cast their ballots, if breakdowns were to occur. Breakdowns can, and do, occur in a number of ways – memory cards that can’t be read, mis-tallied votes, lost votes and more.

The report found that 10 out of the 50 states fall short of best practices when it comes to ballot accounting and reconciliation – the provisions to ensure every vote is counted, and only once, are not well in place. This is just one instance that shows that, while protections against voting fraud and e-voting machine failure have improved in general since 2004, not all states are taking even basic precautions to protect their systems.

You can download the report here. [PDF]

Via CSO Online