Marian K. Schneider: “All races should be audited – whether they are close or not.”
The following is a statement from Marian K. Schneider, president of Verified Voting, formerly Deputy Secretary for Elections and Administration in the Pennsylvania Department of State, about Tuesday’s special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District. For additional media inquires, please contact aurora@newheightscommunications.com
“Pennsylvania law does not mandate a recount in this race, although candidates can petition for a recount, a difficult and expensive process. In Pennsylvania, 83 percent of voters, including all the voters in the 18th Congressional District, cast their votes on electronic voting machines that record the choices directly onto computer memory. Because no paper record of the voters’ choices exist, there is no way to double check if those machines correctly captured voter intent.
All races should be audited – whether they are close or not – but elections like this underscore the need to have processes in place to instill confidence in the results. While there is no indication that there is any need to question the results of yesterday’s election, a ‘recount’ of a paperless voting machine will not catch software bugs, election programming errors or vote rigging malware in the voting machines.
“Pennsylvania announced earlier this year that it would no longer purchase unverifiable direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, but the special election yesterday demonstrates exactly why there is an urgent need for physical paper ballots that can be used to check the computer-generated votes. Verified Voting advocates for a quality assurance process that uses statistical methods and random sampling to verify the accuracy of the results.”