Two Travis County voters, joined by Democratic nominee for Texas Attorney General David Van Os and the Texas Civil Rights Project, filed a lawsuit in state district court Wednesday seeking to block the use of electronic voting machines that do not produce paper receipts.The lawsuit claims that the paperless machines violate the public's right to a secure election and the purity of the ballot box under the Texas Constitution, according to a news release.
Darryl Primo, Gregg County's Precinct 2 commissioner, said he isn't surprised that someone is challenging electronic voting machines. He said he was the lone dissenting vote when commissioners purchased 160 machines in October using a $539,000 grant from the Help America to Vote Act.
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Primo said he voted to purchase additional equipment to produce receipts that would allow for a voter audit trail.
"They voted not to do it. I wanted to do it; they voted not to do it," Primo said, "and it sits like a time bomb ticking away until the next time we have a contested election."
Primo pointed to the 1992 county judge election between Ken Walker and David Wright, when it took five recounts before Walker was declared the winner by fewer than 10 votes.
"Here's the issue, that the people I spoke with a year ago said that no matter how many safeguards were put into the design of these (electronic voting machines), there were vulnerabilities in the system," he said.
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"When every voter cannot be sure that a machine recorded his or her vote the way he or she intended, democracy is not fulfilled," (Van Os) said. "These paperless machines are a direct threat to constitutional democracy. We must have paper ballots."
Much more you should read between the ellipses above. The Austin American-Statesman takes a more pessimistic slant (that is, for voters who want fair elections) :
The lawsuit argues that voters have no way of knowing whether the vote they cast is recorded or stored correctly by the eSlate system, which has been used in Travis County since 2002, and that electronic systems are prone to fraud and mistakes. The group wants an injunction to block use of the machines and cites government and media reports detailing problems with electronic voting in Texas and other states.
Travis County has embraced the technology, switching to electronic voting for everything but absentee ballots. The federal government required Texas to put at least one electronic voting machine in each precinct by Jan. 1 so people with disabilities can easily vote.
DeBeauvoir and a spokesman for Williams, along with the founder of the Austin company that created eSlate, all rejected the claim that paper ballots are necessary for a fair and secure election.
"I am not a lawyer but I kind of doubt that there is much of an argument," said DeBeauvoir, whose office runs elections in Travis County. "I believe that the system is accurate and secure the way it is."
David Hart, the founder of Hart InterCivic, said that more than 400 jurisdictions nationwide use the company's eSlate system, which uses tablet-size screens on which votes are cast with dials and buttons.
He said the system, which is not connected to the Internet, stores ballot information in three electronic places. In Travis County, it captures images of each ballot so electronic or manual recounts can be conducted.
"The eSlate system has got a lot of security built into it," he said.
The difference in opinion presented in these two stories could illustrate the divide between rural Texas and the state's capital city: Austin is where Hart Intercivic -- the company that supplies the eSlates used to cast ballots in Travis County as well as the rest of Texas -- is headquartered. And the state Capitol, where the corrupt Republicans who authorized this purchase gather biennially, is right up the road from the AAS building.
The company seems to have been a small, only-slightly-imbalanced player in the political contributions game (.pdf file) but maybe there's an embedded special interest in there somewhere.
You think?
