15 July 2004

Demand for Paper Trail Escalates

By Kim Zetter - July 14, 2004 - Wired News

Paper has become a big issue in the controversy over electronic voting machines. So activists in 19 states dumped a lot of it on election officials Tuesday as they delivered petitions bearing 350,000 signatures asking officials to mandate voter-verified paper audit trails for touch-screen voting machines in their states.

The Computer Ate My Vote campaign, led by MoveOn, TrueMajority and six other organizations, urged secretaries of state to follow California's lead and adopt measures for improving the integrity of elections this November. They also wanted to rally support for federal legislation that would require a paper trail on voting machines nationwide, which has been stalled in Congress for more than a year.

In addition to demanding a paper trail, the activists urged state and county officials to sign a pledge to support voting processes that are "controlled by public officials, not vendors" and that are verifiable and transparent to the public. This could include demanding that vendors give the source code for their machines to states so that experts could review the code if problems arose.

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