In 2008, an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Nashville passed the
Tennessee Voter Confidence Act (TVCA), joining the growing national
trend of 26 other states requiring voter-verifiable paper ballots and
“optical scan” machines to read them for all Tennessee
elections.
At last, Tennessee voters would have a “paper trail,” a concrete
record to check the accuracy of a vote count in case of computer
glitches, recounts, and allegations of fraud.
Since then, a few election officials have done their best to
stonewall this reform, refusing to implement it, calling for its
repeal, and using misleading information as
ammunition. Flyer readers saw this last week in the
guest Viewpoint of Shelby County election administrator Rich
Holden.
With the help of local lawyers like Shelby County commissioner and
University of Memphis law professor Steve Mulroy, we’re going to court
on behalf of Common Cause Tennessee to try to force these officials to
obey the law.
Holden uses inflated figures — estimating Shelby County’s
paper ballot costs at $400,000 per election. But Hamilton County
has been using paper ballots for years at a cost of less than 25 cents
a ballot and uses estimates of likely voter turnout to determine the
number of ballots to print. Using those parameters, the
highest-turnout race in Shelby County’s election cycle would cost less
than $100,000 and most elections far less. The estimate
provided is inflated by well over a factor of four.
Holden also argues that federal dollars will only pay for one
machine per precinct, so Shelby County will have to pony up for extra
machines. But in counties where optiscan is used, you don’t need
more than one machine per precinct.
Critics further complain of costs for storage and handling of the
paper ballots. But the reality is that where counties
switched from touch-screen to optiscan they’ve saved money,
because there are far fewer machines to store and maintain, the
machines themselves are cheaper and easier to maintain, and the
machines need to be replaced less frequently.
Most incredibly, Holden complains that optiscan will be a slower
process because of the need for “ballot on demand” machines to print
out ballots. In fact, though, optiscan dramatically reduces wait time
for voters.
Right now, a touchscreen voter toggling through screen after screen
of a lengthy Shelby County ballot can take as long as 15 minutes to
vote, while long lines of waiting voters stream out the door. You
can only let from one to three voters vote at a time, depending on
how many expensive touch-screen machines you can afford at a given
polling location.
With optiscan, 15 voters at 15 privacy carrels can pencil in their
choices at their leisure, causing no delay. When they’re done,
they feed their ballots into the optical reader in literally less than
a second. No wait.
Ultimately, it shouldn’t matter what election officials
think: The law says they have to implement optiscan by November
2010.
But election officials have gotten clever, arguing that the law’s
text allows only machines federally certified to 2005 standards, and no
such machines exist.
This would be an effective argument if that’s what the law really
said, but it’s not. Nowhere in the TVCA’s text does it say “2005
standards.” It uses the phrase “applicable voluntary voting system
guidelines,” a technical term that both the federal certifying agency
and the federal statute which created it make clear can refer either to
the 2005 standards or to 2002 standards, for which plenty of certified
machines exist.
State election officials have gone out of their way to interpret the
TVCA to make it impossible to implement. This flies in
the face of the basic principle of statutory construction that a law
should be interpreted to resolve internal contradictions and make it
enforceable.
We can’t explain why the current Republican leadership of the
Tennessee General Assembly and its appointed election bureaucrats, who
only last year embraced “paper trail” reform, are now so determined to
kill it. We can only hope the court will tell them to obey the
law.
In the meantime, Flyer readers deserve the facts about “paper
trail” reform, not self-serving distortions.