May 6 Primaries: Indiana and North Carolina

The May 6 primaries in Indiana and North Carolina will offer very different pictures of election security. In North Carolina, the Presidential race will be audited by a post-election hand count of paper ballots or voter-verifiable paper records. Such records are required by law on all voting systems. Indiana does not yet have a law requiring voter-verified paper records or voter-marked paper ballots. A majority of votes in the May 6 primary will be cast on paperless electronic machines that cannot be properly audited, and some votes will be cast on optically scanned paper ballots. There will be no post-election audit. Click here for a snapshot of Indiana voting systems, and click here for a snapshot of North Carolina's.

Verified Voting: Mandatory Manual Audits of Voter-Verified Paper Records

The map below shows progress to date in our campaign for verifiable elections. Step 1 of our strategy has been to make sure that there is a paper record of every vote and that voters are able to verify the accuracy of that record before the ballot is cast (that paper record is called a "Voter-Verified Paper Record" or VVPR).

VerifiedVoting.org, our partners, and voters across the country have successfully persuaded the majority of state governments to pass legislation or establish regulations to require VVPR. 28 states, with more than half the U.S. population, now have such a requirement. We need your help to make sure the voters in the remaining 22 states are protected, through Federal or state legislation.

But we need to do even more to ensure that the results of elections are verifiable. Voter-verified paper records are most effective when used as the basis for mandatory manual audits in randomly selected precincts. Step 2 of our strategy is to encourage states to adopt laws or regulations requiring such mandatory manual audits of the VVPRs. As the map below shows, 13 states have such a requirement now. We need your help to pass laws in the remaining 37 states to require such audits.

Help us complete the legislative push toward reliable, secure, verifiable, and transparent elections! Please visit our action center (click here) to turn the whole country green with voter-verified paper records and mandatory manual audits of those records. Click on the map to see our legislation tracking web page.

VVPR AND MANDATORY MANUAL AUDITS Map Legend VVPR + manual audits required (17) VVPR required; No audit requirement (13) VVPR not required but in use statewide; No audit requirement (8) No VVPR requirement; No audit requirement (12)

by Adam Cohen, The New York Times, January 10th, 2007

In the summer of 2004, I attended a national meeting of state election directors, and one of the biggest laugh lines was how activists were demanding that electronic voting machines produce a paper record of every vote cast.

An election official stood in front of the group, produced a roll of paper and started to unroll it while saying, to the delight of many in the audience, that the paper record would have to be mighty long to record all of the votes on a California ballot. Ha! Ha! Ridiculous!

The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nuts who hate electronic voting could complain all they wanted, the consensus in the room seemed to be, but paper records for electronic voting were impractical and unnecessary, and they were not going to happen.

What a difference two years makes.

Today, 27 states — including such large ones as California, New York, Illinois and Ohio — require electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper trail. There is paper-trail legislation pending in a dozen more states. Read more...

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