WPLN aired a 5 minute feature this morning by Blake Farmer on the battle over secure and verifiable elections in Tennessee.
The next big election in Tennessee is for governor, and the primary is just a year away. A new state law says voters are supposed to have paper-based voting machines to use by then. But a dispute over replacing touch screen voting machines has taken a partisan turn. The stalemate hinges on how to interpret one line of the Voter Confidence Act. WPLN’s Blake Farmer reports.
In the piece, Farmer covers the 100% unverifiable electronic voting machines we use in 93 out of 95 counties in the state, the inability to hold a recount when using these machines, the two counties in Tennessee that use paper ballots and optical scan machines, and the Voter Confidence Act that would give us paper ballots in Tennessee. He also interviews Sean Flaherty of VerifiedVoting.org, Rep. Gary Odom (D-Nashville), State Election Coordinator Mark Goins, and Scott Allen of the Hamilton County Election Commission.
Go to WPLN.org to listen or read the transcript.
But the most interesting interview is with the Election Assistance Commission’s Matt Masterson, who Farmer checks in with after Goins tells him that he can’t comply with the Voter Confidence Act because the law says he has to buy optical scan machines (used for counting the paper ballots) certified to the latest Election Assistance Commission standards (2005) but there just aren’t any that have been through the certification process.
With Masterson’s help, Farmer uncovers the flaw in the loophole Goins is trying to exploit:
The election coordinator’s office says it’s true, he doesn’t want the state buying machines not certified to the latest standard. But don’t expect the federal agency in charge of writing those guidelines to jump in the middle of the dispute. The Election Assistance Commission makes suggestions, not mandates, says the EAC’s Matt Masterson.
MASTERSON: “The EAC’s testing and certification program and the standards that they use are voluntary and the states can choose to use the program in any way that they find necessary.â€
So the state’s predicament is self-imposed, and the clock is ticking.
So, according to the Election Assistance Commission, the standards they set forth pertaining to voting machines are voluntary – each individual state is within its right to decide for itself which machines to buy. In other words, as a state we would be following the standards by deciding for ourselves whether or not to follow the standards. Which means that the Secretary of State’s office is choosing not to follow the law by implementing the Voter Confidence Act.
Should he be allowed to do that?
