LIBERADIO(!)

Yesterday, the Tennessee General Assembly adjourned for the year without passing HB0614/SB0872 – the bill that would have delayed implementation of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA – the paper ballot bill).

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).

So during yesterday’s Senate session, not only did Senator Roy Herron save paper ballots, but he also saved secure and verifiable elections by keeping the strongest bits of the TVCA – mandatory recounts and ballots of record – intact.

Senator Roy Herron: “Electronic voting machines can steal elections. They can steal your election….Yet today we decide whether to jeopardize our 2010 elections by allowing electronic voting machines without paper verification. Machines that are absolutely unreliable and unverifiable.

In Iowa in 2006, an auditor noticed a 20-year incumbent being beaten 10 to 1 by a newcomer, but when she checked the paper vote against the electronic vote, she discovered that the incumbent actually was way ahead of the challenger. This error would not have been caught without a paper trail….

In voting last year here in Tennessee, citizens experienced so-called “vote flipping.” The New York Times reported, “…voters complained that [electronic] voting machines registered their votes for Mr. McCain as votes for Mr. Obama.” How can this happen? Researchers at Princeton discovered it is all too easy to infect voting machines with a virus that, in seconds, can flip vote counts.

All it takes to hack into the electronic machine is a common flash drive. This is why the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations strongly recommended that Tennessee “implement voter-verified paper audit trails statewide.” That is why just last year we passed – and you voted for – the current law. TACIR recommends optical scan machines, like those used by Pickett County and Hamilton County. Hamilton says it is “very satisfied” and “would highly recommend [optical scan systems] to other interested counties.”

But now some say we cannot – or should not – have voter verifiable paper trails in Tennessee in 2010. But counties as large as Hamilton and as small as Pickett have them.

They have them from “sea to shining sea” – from Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida.

They have them in our neighbors like North Carolina, Missouri, Alabama.

They have them in large states with big cities like New York and California.

They have them in states as rural as the Dakotas, Idaho, West Virginia.

In fact, 33 states – 33 states – currently use or require a voter verifiable paper trail. Why can’t we?

Sure we’ve new Election Commissioners and Registrars, and even a new Coordinator of Elections, but with all this change, what about change we can believe in?

What about elections we can believe in?

*The reason why it’s “nearly perfect” is that in a perfect world we’d be counting all the ballots by hand.