A federal judge ruled this week that Georgia does not have to replace its electronic voting machines with machines that create paper records before the election in November. In her ruling, though, the judge noted she’s “gravely concerned” about Georgia’s slow pace in addressing electronic voting vulnerabilities. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for accurate and verifiable elections, about those vulnerabilities and how secure electronic voting machines are.
On her opinion of the judge’s ruling in Georgia: “I do think that it’s a significant decision, but I think that the judge was concerned about the amount of time before the election, that there wasn’t enough time to smoothly implement paper ballots. “There’s only seven weeks between now and the election, and the early voting would start soon, too. So I think that was a greater concern for the court, but I think the judge made a lot of very significant findings about the vulnerabilities that are present in paperless computer systems that count our votes.”
… On what her ideal voting system would look like: “A computer, like an optical or digital scanner … and the ballot is marked either with a pen or a pencil or with a ballot marking device that has accessibility features for voters who can’t use a pen or pencil, and then that ballot is scanned and tabulated, and it’s retained in the voting system, if necessary for a recount and definitely for an audit.
“It’s not enough just to have the paper ballot. You have to actually look at it after the fact and check to make sure the software has worked properly, and that’s a very important concept, is that we rely on the software, we leverage the technology to make our lives easier, but then we have to check and make sure it worked properly.”
Full Article: How Vulnerable Are Electronic Voting Machines? | Here & Now.