Verifiable Paper Trail Bill Filed

The Associated Press recently reported on an avoided tragedy in Hidalgo County's administration of the November general election. Electronic voting machines are, without a doubt, a needed upgrade in our country's most important democratic function. Although this is a great improvement over the manual systems in terms of ease of use and speed, there are some troubling possibilities that need to be addressed. Of key importance is, what I believe, the need for a verifiable paper trail. Before going into specifics, here is what was reported about the recent elections here in Hidalgo County:

It seems a programming error by a widely used Nebraska-based election system company Tuesday appears to be isolated to Hidalgo County, election officials said.

The county's top election official discovered the mistake when early voting results in House District 28 put long-shot Constitution Party candidate Ron Avery ahead of Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar by almost 2,000 votes with roughly 2,200 tabulated.

"We knew there was no way that could be correct," said Teresa Navarro, Hidalgo County elections administrator.

The problem was not in the touch screen voting machines, nor the cartridges that record the totals, but in the specific software program written to compile the totals, Navarro said.

The machines and cartridges correctly recorded votes and election officials were able to manually add votes based on the totals from each of the county's 500 voting machines.

"It was a coding-slash-programming error," Navarro said. "I can tell you the programmer is devastated."

Election Systems and Software, which employs the programmer, provides voting equipment to 145 of the 254 counties in Texas, according to the secretary of state.

The incident was not serious enough for Texas officials to consider decertifying the company, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the secretary of state.

This was a minor error that was caught only because it was obvious that a long-shot candidate could not have garnered more votes than Democrats Henry Cuellar and Frank Enriquez. This incident raises the question, what if those votes went to one of the other candidates? What if the difference between candidates was only a few hundred votes so that no red flags went up? Would they have caught it?

This is precisely the sort of uncertainty that I want to address so today, the first day of pre-filing for the 80th Regular Session, I filed HB 123. We need some kind of verifiable paper trail that we can follow to give the public peace of mind when they vote. We need to be assured that the votes we cast go to the candidates we choose. We need to know that, if it comes down to it, we can do a manual recount and come up with the correct results.

Looks like Washington has the same idea. Read more.

Click Here for my recent interview on the radio regarding this subject.