WaPo - Gov. Ehrlich: Use Paper Ballots for Nov. Election

[Tin Man]

What a topsy-turvey world we occupy... here we have a republican governor calling for ditching Diebold DREs in favor of paper ballots, while the democratic state assembly insists the opposite :shrug:

Ehrlich: Use Paper Ballots for Nov. Election
Primary Glitches Linked to Electronic Voting Machines

A week after the primary elections were plagued by human error and technical glitches, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. today called for the state to scrap its $106 million dollar electronic voting apparatus and revert to the paper ballot system for the November election.

"When in doubt go paper, go low-tech," he said. The state's top election's official quickly denounced the plan to swap voting systems just seven weeks before the Nov. 7 general election as "crazy." And Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller (D-Calvert) said it "cannot happen, it will not happen."

Ehrlich said that if necessary he would call a special session of the Maryland General Assembly to allow the state to change voting systems.

But Miller and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) dismissed the idea of a special session, saying elections officials should focus on fixing the current voting system. "We paid millions," Miller said. "These are state-of-the-art machines."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/20/AR2006092001356.html

[w4rma]

1. Ehrlich is right on target. The idiots need to listen to him on *this*. nt

[Sperk]

2. WTF! They're all in cohoots with eachother....this is a set up for

Rove claiming that the Dems stole the election if they aren't successful with Diebolding the elections....too many races they have to steal.

[GOPBasher]

3. I wouldn't mind, though, if Republicans were with us on this.

I would like it if Republican voters realized that, potentially, their votes can be stolen with no paper trail just as ours can. A computer programmer can be a Democrat too, even if the company is owned by Republicans.

[magellan]

4. It would be a good start, but he doesn't seem to oppose op-scanners

In the spring, Ehrlich advocated leasing optical scan machines that use paper ballots, a proposal that won unanimous support in the House of Delegates but was rejected by the Senate.

The risks are the same for DREs and opti-scanners. Everyone overlooks this because no one is considering the tabulation software used to count the votes at the end of the day, that it's proprietary software too, and once your vote goes in ANYTHING can be done to it. Until this is explained to everybody so they understand it, our election system is at grave risk.

The article doesn't state clearly whether Ehrlich now wants paper ballots that are hand-counted, but hand-counted paper ballots is the only way towards a reliable, fair and clean election.