“Tennessee’s Elections are Screwed” Friday continues with a trip in the way back machine.
It’s the year 2000, and Microvote, the company that provides paperless electronic voting machines to more than 45 counties in Tennessee, describes the miracle that is their products’ recount feature:
Counting the ballots is as simple as pulling the memory cartridge out of the unit (it’s a smart card in the new Infinity) and inserting it into a reader hooked up to the PC handling the vote tally. Recounting can be just as simple; MicroVote maintains that the Florida recounts that dragged on for days could be done in a morning on a MicroVote system.
What’s most important about the recounts: “We’ve had many recounts up here in Lake County, but nothing where the machine vote ever changed,” Fajman says [Michelle Fajman, supervisor of elections in Lake County]. Unlike the much-maligned punch-card ballots used in much of Florida (and a fair amount of Indiana), MicroVote’s machines have no use for “chad,” the little ballot tidbits that caused such a stink in November. And they don’t allow “overvoting,” picking more than one candidate.
That’s right! The recount from the machine never changes. And lady, let me tell ya, that’s not a good thing considering we have no idea if the voter’s intent was correctly recorded by the machines’s software in the first place. And if the voters intent was not recorded correctly – either because of malicious software or poorly calibrated machines or a mistake in the code – we will never know because we can’t see inside the machines to check.
The Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (the paper ballot bill), which was passed almost unanimously in 2008 by both the House and Senate and which Tennessee Republicans are looking to now repeal, would allow us to vote on paper ballots thereby capturing the actual intent of the voter. Optical scan machines would then count the paper ballots. In case of a recount, the paper ballot would become the ballot of record and it would be recounted (and yeah, you might actually get a different total when recounted – but it would be a more accurate total!).
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[...] of record in case of a recount. (The paperless electronic voting machines we have now only have one mechanism in place for a recount – press the same button again and get a repeat of the exact same totals you got before). 3) [...]
[...] The TVCA is a rare-breed among bills because the way in which it was crafted makes it nearly perfect.* Not only does it give Tennessee voters paper ballots that register the voter’s intent BEFORE any machine touches the ballots, but it also requires mandatory hand-counted recounts in a certain percentage of precincts (to make sure the totals from the machines match the actual ballot totals) AND requires that the paper ballots that recorded the voter’s original intent become the ballot of record (incredibly handy in the case of a close election or necessary recount). [...]
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