News & Media
Senate OKs paper trail votes
Baltimore Sun (April 7, 2007)
The
Maryland Senate unanimously approved a bill yesterday that would require the
state to scrap its $65 million electronic-voting system and switch to new
machines that have a paper record.
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the Article
Bill
on Voting Paper Trail Gets New Life in the Senate
Washington Post: Annapolis Notebook
(April 6, 2007)
A
bill that would require electronic voting machines to produce paper records has
been resurrected in the last days of the legislative session.
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the Article
Florida
Shifting to Voting System With Paper Trail
New York Times (Feb. 2, 2007)
Gov.
Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting
machines that many of Florida’s
counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will
instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in
time for the 2008 presidential election.
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the Article
Legislators
Warming to Early Vote
Creation of Paper Trail for Ballots Also Is Gaining
Support
Washington
Post (Feb.
2, 2007)
Measures to change
the way elections are run in Maryland are gaining momentum in the General
Assembly, with top legislative leaders agreeing yesterday that the state
Constitution needs to be amended to allow early voting.
They
have also reached a consensus that Maryland needs to supplement its electronic
voting system with a paper trail for each vote. A bill could pass this session,
but Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said a lack of
funding and limitations in technology might make it difficult to fully implement
changes.
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the Article
Officials Warm To Paper Trail To Verify Votes In Maryland
Washington
Post (Jan.
13, 2007)
Legislation
mandating a paper record to verify voting in Maryland is gaining momentum in the
General Assembly, which might join a national movement to make touch-screen
voting more reliable and tamper-proof.
U.S. Bars Lab From
Testing Electronic Voting
New York Times (Jan.
4, 2007)
One of the three main “testing” labs used to
evaluate voting machines, Ciber, Inc., was recently barred from further work in
this area due to lack of quality control and inadequate documentation of testing
performed. This article highlights the extremely deficient systems that exist
for evaluating and certifying voting equipment, including the machines currently
in use in Maryland. Of additional
note, the problems with this lab led to a federal response last summer;
however, this news did not appear in the public arena until January 2007.
Lawmakers focus on voting issues
Baltimore Sun (Dec.
20, 2006)
Voting issues, including the type of technology
used in the future elections, will be a top priority agenda item when the
General Assembly reconvenes next week. The
need for a “paper trail” of some sort is widely acknowledged.
The Diebold corporation has no printer available that could attach to
Maryland’s current DRE machines, therefore the real choice is between swapping
for a different model of DRE which does have a printer (but did not work well in
Cuyahoga County, OH in the last election) OR changing over to OpScan technology,
which is likely to be less expensive (and is currently used in MD for
provisional and absentee ballot tabulations).
Big Shift Seen in
Voting Methods with Turn Back to a Paper Trail
New York Times (Dec.
8, 2006)
Maryland’s
paperless DRE’s may soon be prohibited by federal mandates.
“New
federal guidelines, along with legislation given a strong chance to pass in
Congress next year, will probably combine to make the paperless voting machines
obsolete”
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