Utah drops the ball on election recounts

[biscotti]

Paper trail: Lieutenant governor dropped the ball on election recounts

Tribune Editorial
Salt Lake Tribune

After disputed recounts snarled the 2000 presidential election for more than a month, Congress wrote new election law that ushered in touch-screen voting systems. Given that experience, it is hard to believe that the Utah elections office would drag its feet about setting statewide standards for recounts using the new voting technology.
Then again, maybe not.
snip
HAVA further requires that each voting system produce a permanent paper record with an audit capacity, and that it be available as an official record for any recount. What the law does not say is how that permanent paper record should be used in a recount.
When a Tribune reporter asked Herbert's office about this, his chief of staff said that county clerks would decide how to handle recounts. He later amended that to say that the state elections office was still working on guidelines.
Letting each county clerk decide how to proceed does not jibe with HAVA's requirement for statewide uniform standards of what constitutes a vote. Under Utah law, the paper ballot, meaning the audit tape, maybe the official ballot.
The question is not simple. Ohio, for example, has decided to recount 3 percent of the votes using the paper trail, check the paper summaries for the other 97 percent of the vote, and compare those results to the computer memories in the voting machines. Swensen was arguing for a similar procedure a year ago.
Given widely publicized disputes about whether the computer memories of touch-screen voting machines are secure, state officials should be doing everything they can to instill voter confidence. Leaving the recount issue unresolved does the opposite.
http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=4028266

[Wilms]

1. Saw the story a few days ago of a BoE asking how to do a recount.

I thought, "well duh, good time to think about it".

Can someone take a guess how they could buy a pile of e-voting junk without having considered this?

:grr: