Panel rejects verifiable voting machines

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — A federal advisory panel Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines whose results could be independently verified.

The panel drafting voting guidelines for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission voted 6-6 not to adopt a proposal that would have required electronic machines used by millions of voters to produce a paper record or other independent means of checking election results. Eight votes were needed to pass it.

The proposal closely mirrored a report released last week that warned that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure.

Some panel members who voted against the proposal said they support paper records but don't think the risk of widespread voting-machine meltdowns is great enough to rush the requirement into place and overwhelm state election boards.

"They should be longer-range goals," said Britain Williams of the National Association of Election Directors. "You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware."

Some panel members worried the systems with audit trails could present problems of their own, including printer errors. Others said it was unclear that paper records could be used by voters who are blind or have other disabilities.

But panel member Ronald Rivest, an MIT computer scientist, warned his colleagues that software errors in the paperless machines could go undetected without a way of verifying the voting results. That could lead to a scenario where you have "got an election result that is wrong and you have no evidence to show that it's wrong," he said.