Computerized voting lacks paper trail, scholar warns

Stanford Report, February 4, 2003

Warning of programming error, equipment malfunction and malicious tampering, computer scientists from around the country, led by Stanford Professor David Dill, say computerized voting machines should provide a voter-verifiable audit trail.

"The problem is not really with computerized voting systems per se," Dill says. "The problem is really that there is no way to double-check the results. It's really a problem of accountability."

More than 110 computer scientists and technologists from universities and laboratories across the nation have signed Dill's "Resolution on Electronic Voting," which states that it is "crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked."


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