Maryland State Elections Administrator Linda Lamone continues to resist the idea of requiring some sort of paper verification of voting, even though state Sen. Roy Dyson, D-St. Mary?s, chairman of the election law subcommittee, said he is “being urged, being pushed, being forced” by legislators to establish a verifiable paper trail.
“That?s a very important issue, and it?s going to have to be resolved,” he told Lamone at a hearing Thursday.
“I can?t believe that people are saying that we?re going back to paper,” said Lamone, who became a controversial figure due to her promotion of electronic voting. “I think that?s a waste of money.”
Lamone said there are much better ways to monitor and verify voting, including new technology tools.
Deputy elections administrator Ross Goldstein said those tools include Vote Here technology, which piggybacks on the voting machine and allows voters to check their votes online, much as you can check an ATM bank transaction. A company called Democracy Systems has produced a technology called VoteGuard, which makes a continuous video capturing what happens on a voting machine screen. This can be used later to verify the results on the computer.
An MIT professor also has produced an audio capture that a voter can listen to and then be replayed to verify results on the machine, Goldstein said.
Lamone said she believes that the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, created in the wake of the voting problems in the 2000 presidential elections, is going to require some sort of “independent verifiability.” But “they are not supporting a paper trail,” Lamone said.
“I just don?t think paper is the way to go if we can find another way to verify it,” Lamone said.
