From NCEIT Director Jim Womack on the Voting Machines
Jim is also the National Work Group Director for Voting Technology and Voting Systems which has a Zoom Call the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month.
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Thanks Doug. I once had a Philosophy professor who sagely advised, "No paper will refuse ink." In other words, there is no limit to what might be tried by any agency, commercial or governmental, to modify election procedures, for good or for ill.
We are not going to stop the use of tabulating machines in elections. Trickery like this to hold state election entities to a standard they cannot attain, will not stand the test of judicial review. I would be very surprised if legislative attorneys in AZ even permitted the SCR to get past a floor vote of that body.
I am all for holding election agencies accountable to high standards. I am all for making these tabulating machines as auditable and transparent as possible. And I am completely in agreement that every person should cast a paper ballot that can be examined to see all markings from the voter.
However, the billions of HAVA dollars that have been spent acquiring machines will not be undone anytime in the next decade. in fact. most republican legislators are just fine with the use of machines- even in full awareness of their vulnerabilities.
I find it much more useful to address the vulnerabilities of voting machines where I might be most productive- that of compelling the escrow of machine source code for periodic examination, making the machines more transparent for examination of their output files (including CVRs), examination of Poll Tapes, and conducting audits where a high percentage of hand counted ballots are compared to machine tallies.
Citizens and Boards of Elections want to complete their counts on election night, and they do not want to spend enormous amounts of money and time to perform 100% hand counting of ballots (where human errors are abundant).
Best/
Jim