An article about the broken voting machines we use in Tennessee - from almost 2 years ago.

Last week, the Memphis Flyer ran an editorial about the impact of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act on touch-screen electronic voting machines by Rich Holden, the chief administrator for the Shelby County Election Commission.

Mr. Holden’s assertion that “the General Assembly should revise the act’s deadline provisions or, better, rethink it altogether” is being eviscerated in the comments section of the piece (“Holden’s initial premise – ‘if it ain’t broke’ – has been demonstrated to be way off the mark by all credible studies of DREs [electronic voting machines],…” etc..), with the only agreement coming from someone who can’t be bothered to give his real name.

There’s really nothing new in Holden’s editorial that we haven’t already heard from people who for whatever reason refuse to accept that the election machine system in Tennessee is already broken. What really stands out is what he didn’t say.

Nowhere in his editorial does he mention that the touch screen machines we use now simply do not work. They are broken and as such they cannot be trusted to record the votes of Tennesseans accurately. Recently we’ve seen an example how these machines malfunction (vote flipping) during the special election last month in Williamson County. And we’ve seen countless other instances of these machines malfunctioning since 2006.

The broken machines even made Newsweek (“Short-circuiting the vote”) and the NY Times (“Can you count on voting machines?”) and in October 2008, the Brennan Center for Justice, the non-partisan public research and law institute, sent a letter telling the Secretaries of State in 16 states that the machines didn’t work.

Nor does Mr. Holden address the importance of giving Tennesseans secure and accurate elections or how continuing to use these broken touch-screen electronic voting machines inherently diminishes that importance.

The people of Tennessee deserve secure and accurate elections, not broken machines, and any election administrator who refuses to replace these broken machines is failing in his trusted pursuit to give the people of Tennessee true access to the democratic process.