VVCVa Press Releases

The Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia (VVCV) will seek new legislation this year to provide meaningful recounts in close elections and to ensure that new paper-based election systems are audited for accuracy.

In hallmark legislation last year, the General Assembly banned further purchases of touchscreen voting machines, known as direct record electronic, or DRE, machines. The machines have been shown to be vulnerable to manipulation and error, and do not permit voters to verify that their choices have been correctly recorded. The decision to phase out DREs puts Virginia in line with a number of other states that have recently decided to abandon DREs in the face of security concerns.

Local Virginia jurisdictions that use DREs are expected to replace them over the next few years with optical scanners that read paper ballots. The scanners tally the votes, and the paper ballots are retained as a “paper trail.” But there are currently no requirements for anyone to examine the paper trail, and that, say VVCV members, is a critical next step.

“Optical scanning is a more secure, less expensive, and voter-verifiable technology,” says Jeremy Epstein, a nationally-recognized expert in election machine security and a co-founder of Virginia Verified Voting, one of the coalition members. “But the point of having a paper trail is to look at the paper. Any machine can make errors, and some can potentially be tampered with. So until you actually have a system in place to audit a small, randomly-selected set of machines by comparing the machine tallies with the paper ballots, voters still can’t have confidence in the integrity of the vote count.”

The paper ballots should also be examined in the case of a recount. Carol Doran Klein, a lawyer with the New Electoral Reform Alliance for Virginia (New Era), another coalition member, points out that current law does not permit election officials to examine the paper ballots even when they exist. “Right now in Virginia, a recount basically consists of going back to the machine and asking it to give you the same number it gave you the first time,” she says. “It’s not a real recount, and that’s unfair to both the candidates and the voters.”

Virginia has seen a number of very close races in recent years, adds Sharon Henderson, another New Era lawyer, but it’s rare for the outcome to change as the result of a recount conducted under current law. Citing this year’s Senate race between Ken Cuccinelli and Janet Oleszek, Henderson says Oleszek is fighting an uphill battle. “The law simply doesn’t let officials look at the actual ballots that were cast, even to the extent they’ve got them.”

Olga Hernandez, President of the League of Women Voters of Virginia, says her group joined the VVCV last year because they were worried about not having an actual ballot to recount. Last year the state took the first step by disallowing future DRE purchases. “We need legislation that provides for meaningful recounts and regular, random audits. We need to have verifiable election machines, so we need to take the obvious next step, and put the ‘verify’ in ‘verifiable’.”

For additional information, please contact: Jeremy Epstein, Virginia Verified Voting, 703.989.8907, Jeremy.Epstein@vvcva.org; Ivy Main, New Era for VA, 703.967.2876, ivymain@cox.net; Carol Doran Klein, New Era for VA, 703.883.9514, doranklein@cox.net.

A coalition of citizens’ groups will be working to pass legislation through the Virginia 2007 legislative session to require all election machines in the state to provide voter-verifiable paper audit trails.

Currently, most Virginians vote on paperless machines, known as direct record electronic (DRE) machines that resemble computer laptops. Critics, including computer experts, note that software errors or deliberate manipulation of the software programs can result in errors that may not be detectable before, or even during and after, an election, and that such errors could affect the results of elections. With voters unable to verify that their votes have been properly cast, and with no paper record of each vote, there is no way to audit the machines or to conduct a recount in the event of a close or contested election.

“Every independent study of paperless electronic voting systems has shown that they are insecure, vulnerable to attack from insiders and outsiders, and preclude meaningful recounts or audits”, said Jeremy Epstein, co-founder of Virginia Verified Voting and a member of two Virginia legislative commissions that studied the machines. “The vast majority of computer scientists, including virtually all computer security experts believe that the addition of paper (preferably in the form of optical scan ballots) is necessary for accurate recountable elections.” Epstein added “the current situation in Florida’s 13th Congressional District shows what can happen when there is no paper backup - we will never know if 18,000 voters intentionally skipped selecting a Congressional candidate or if a machine malfunction dropped their votes”.

While it is possible to add paper printers to DREs to achieve the goal of verifiability, the Coalition believes the better approach is the use of paper ballots read by optical scanners. Not only is this a less expensive approach, but it is already in use by several Virginia jurisdictions for counting absentee ballots, and the system is familiar both to election officials and to voters who vote by absentee ballot.

Last year the New Era for VA and Virginia Verified Voting supported legislation introduced by Delegate Tim Hugo and Senator Jeannemarie Devolites Davis to mandate voter-verifiable paper audit trails and require regular random audits. Delegate Hugo and Senator Devolites Davis have announced plans to introduce similar legislation this year. The Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia invites all Virginians who care about the security and integrity of our democratic process to join with us to support these necessary reforms.