Here is a link to an article in the Lancaster PA paper about the sad status of electronic voting in PA. The Federal money to buy voting machines is only available under Dec. 31. PA. has only certified one brand of voting machine, and it does not have a paper trail.
PA. officials said they don't want a paper receipt that a voter can take with them, because it might lead to sale of votes. This easily could be resolved with a system that makes the paper receipt visible to the voter, but then drops it into a secure box. After all, the value of the receipt is in being able to check the boxes, not in having all the voters bring their receipts back in.
http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/18292------
www.votetrustusa.org
"VVPR Bill Introduced in Pennsylvania - HB 2000
By Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, VoteTrustUSA
September 27, 2005
"A bill that would require a voter verified paper record of every vote and a routine random manual auidt of 5% of the state's precincts has been introduced into the Pennsylvania Assembly today by Rep. Dan Frankel (D-Allegheny) and 38 initial bi-partisan co-sponsors.
In the 2004 General Election, Pennsylvania witnessed an alarming number of incidents of voting machine malfunctions and irregular vote totals. Machines malfunctioned and votes were lost in many Pennsylvania counties. And Pennsylvania was not alone, with hundreds of incidents in precincts and counties across the nation.
Many state legislatures have addressed concern over the accuracy and security of the machinery on which voters’ votes are cast and counted, with more than half the states in the country having required that voting machines produce a voter verified paper record of the vote, with legislation introduced in 13 others... The recent final report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform ...noted four reasons that a VVPR was important: “(a) to increase citizens’ confidence that their vote will be counted accurately, (b) to allow for a recount, (c) to provide a backup in cases of loss of votes due to computer malfunction, and (d) to test – through a random selection of machines – whether the paper result is the same as the electronic result.”
...Much of the language of Frankel’s bill tracks US Congressman Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 550) dubbed by VerifiedVoting and echoed by the New York Times as “the gold standard” of vote verification legislation."
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