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Elections supervisor drops the ball on e-voting

Buddy Johnson is either misinformed or overly hopeful. The Hillsborough County Elections Supervisor said yesterday that Hillsborough’s electronic voting machines are secure and that no paper trail is needed to ensure an accurate counting of the votes.

Four years ago, Hillsborough County's presidential vote counting won national plaudits for being among the few operations in Florida that performed well amid widespread ballot and recount mismanagement.

One new elections supervisor later, the pressure is on for a repeat this year - or at least an avoidance of major embarrassment.

On Tuesday, Elections Supervisor Buddy Johnson unveiled a voter registration blitz aimed at improving statistics that show 1 in 4 eligible county voters remains unregistered.

Johnson defended the security of the county's new $13 million touch-screen voting machines. He said calls by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Boca Raton, for a system of paper receipts as a backup record of electronic voting are misguided.

It would take ``an unbelievable conspiracy'' to breach the security of the machines, which replaced punch-card ballots used in 2000, Johnson said.

Taxpayers would have to shell out $3 million to $4 million more to create a paper trail in Hillsborough, he said.

Still, ``if the Legislature asks us, I'll be the first to do it,'' said Johnson, a former Republican legislator and Plant City restaurateur who succeeded Pam Iorio a year ago when she resigned to run for Tampa mayor.

First, plenty of recent studies have shown that tampering with these machines in order to skew results is a relatively easy process. This is America. Our history is rife with election fraud. With stakes this high, people are going to try and cheat. They always have. E-voting makes the cheating process even easier, and very difficult to detect.

Second, even if our Elections Supervisor wrongly feels there is no need for a paper trail, voters across the country are demanding just such a system. With a paper trail actual recounts of paper ballots are doable. A voter can check the accuracy of the machine by glancing at a paper receipt before dropping said receipt into a ballot box. ATMs and gas pumps spit out receipts. What’s so hard about making a voting machine do the same?

Finally, it’s not just security that is the problem with these machines. E-voting machines are computers with Microsoft software. Every computer user knows that Microsoft software is buggy. Computers crash, programs do strange things, and touch screens get out of whack. A paper trail is the only way to double check an e-voting system and ensure the accuracy of the vote count.

Learn lots more about e-voting here.