Are Paper Trails Really the Answer to Election Disputes?
That was the issue before the House Administration Committee in today's hearing, as described here. The witness list may be found here, along with a link to a webcast of the hearing. Before the committee is the current version of the Holt Bill (H.R. 550), which would require electronic voting machines to have generate a contemporaneous paper record or voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT).

Among those testifying were Jim Dickson of the American Association of People with Disabilities, Edward Felton who co-authored the recent Princeton paper on the Diebold AccuVote TS, and Michael Shamos of Carnegie-Mellon University. As usual, Professor Shamos' thoughts are particularly incisive and worth quoting at length:

The proposed bill is based on three major assumptions, all of which are false. First, it assumes that paper records are more secure than electronic ones, a proposition that has repeatedly been shown to be wrong throughout history. Second, it assumes that voting machines without voter-verified paper trails are unauditable because they are claimed to be "paperless," which is also false. They are neither paperless nor unauditable. Third, it assumes that paper trails actually solve the problems exhibited by DRE machines, which is likewise incorrect.

The reason that mechanical voting machines were introduced over a century ago was to stop rampant fraud involving paper ballots. H.R. 550 would restore us to the year 1890, when anyone who wanted to tamper with an election needed to do no more than manipulate pieces of paper. The very idea that a paper record is secure at all continues to be refuted in every election. A recent example is the May 2006 primary held in Cleveland, Ohio. That state has a VVPAT requirement. When the paper records from the election were examined by an independent study group commissioned by Cuyahoga County, ten percent of the paper records were found to be illegible, defaced or entirely missing.

H.R. 550 provides that in the event of any inconsistency between electronic and paper records, the paper records are irrebuttably presumed to be correct. Applying that provision to Cleveland would have resulted in the disenfranchisement of 10 percent of the electorate because their paper records could not be read.

The argument is made that security problems with DRE voting demand remediation of the type proposed in the bill. Indeed, Prof. Felten at Princeton, Harri Hursti and others have done a great service by exposing security vulnerabilities in voting systems. Some of these vulnerabilities are severe, and require immediate repair. But the point is that they are easily remedied. The question for the Committee is what the proper response to such discoveries ought to be. When tainted spinach was found in California, Congress did not ban the eating or distribution of leafy vegetables, even though least one human life had already been lost. The appropriate reaction to the discovery of a security flaw is to repair it, not to outlaw an entire category of voting machine with which we have a quarter-century of experience....

Numerous effective verification methods are known that are not based on vulnerable paper records. These have not yet been implemented in viable commercial systems. I understand that scientists at NIST will soon announce another one. If H.R. 550 is enacted, there would be no point in continuing research and development on such better methods, since the statute would prohibit the use of any system not based on paper....

My purpose here today is not simply to complain about the bill, but to offer a constructive alternative. As part of my written testimony I have included a complete markup of the proposed legislation that retains its essential positive features, such as voter verification, but eliminates its ill-advised provisions. I urge the Committee not to report the bill favorably in its present form.

- posted by Dan Tokaji @ 9:34 PM