E-voting: Enough, protesters say

SANTA CLARA COUNTY WATCHDOGS SPARKED NATIONAL MOVEMENT

Mercury News Editorial

What started as the dissent of a few computer scientists and good-government watchdogs in Santa Clara County 18 months ago has grown into a national movement.

Last week, thousands rallied in 24 cities in 19 states to mark ``The Computer Ate My Vote'' day. Mostly, they marched to secretaries of states' offices. There they turned in the signatures of 350,000 voters demanding that touch-screen voting machines print out a paper copy for voters to verify their finished ballot.

The organizers included Voter Verified Foundation, which Stanford computing professor David Dill founded, and MoveOn.org, a mass mobilization group that proved it can turn out protesters in the flesh as well as on the Web.

A few states have acted to require a voter-verified paper audit, including California, where Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has mandated it by 2006, and Nevada, which will offer it in November. Nevada and Santa Clara County use touch-screens by Sequoia Voting Systems, which announced last week that its printer for a voter-verified paper audit had passed federal testing. But there's been resistance elsewhere, especially in Florida, Georgia and Maryland, by entrenched bureaucrats and lawmakers who don't have a clue about the security holes in the new systems.

Congress should be getting into the act. It compounded the problem by appropriating billions of dollars for touch-screen systems without demanding security and accuracy features and without creating a credible certification process. And bills to demand a voter-verified paper audit one by Rep. Russ Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, and another by Sen. John Ensign, a Nevada Republican have been bottled up.

The activists have it right. It shouldn't take another election debacle for politicians to get the message.