State Elections Administrator Linda Lamone continues to strongly insist that the touch-screen voting machines are fine and that adding a paper trail is not only unnecessary but a mistake:
‘‘All voting systems have security vulnerabilities. The challenge for election officials is how to manage those vulnerabilities,” state elections administrator Linda H. Lamone told the House Ways and Means Committee. ‘‘Simply adding paper does not make it secure.”
. . .But Michael I. Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor, sees no need for abandoning the current system.
‘‘I think that the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ applies here,” said Shamos who has analyzed voting systems since 1980. ‘‘There is nothing demonstrably wrong with the Maryland voting system.”
A paper trail should not be considered a panacea to the state’s election woes, Shamos said. In fact, it could produce more problems because an internal printer could result in paper jams or other mechanical failures.
The touch-screen machines record votes internally, which Shamos said is less error-prone than a paper trail, and acts like an airplane’s black box, which is used to retrieve flight data in crashes.
The issue gained steam after last year’s primary election fiasco that had some voters questioning whether their votes were accurately recorded. The touch-screen machines store tallies electronically, but do not produce a receipt to verify voters’ selections.
Lamone said adding printers to the existing equipment ‘‘would disrupt the voting system.” If approved, the state and counties would share the cost of the new equipment, which has not yet been determined.
However, Montgomery County legislators appear to be leading the fight for a paper trail in Maryland:
‘‘There’s no good way to audit an electronic record in a chip,” said House Majority Leader Kumar P. Barve (D-Dist. 17) of Gaithersburg, who supports a paper trail. ‘‘It certainly wouldn’t be accepted in a financial accounting.”
House Ways and Means Chairwoman Sheila E. Hixson has sponsored legislation calling for a paper trail and said it will be ‘‘one of the first bills up for a hearing.”
With the 2008 presidential election looming, Hixson (D-Dist. 20) of Silver Spring said lawmakers may consider emergency legislation to accelerate the proposal.
