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Electronic Voting Receipts Urged

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From Associated Press

Experts told a federal panel Wednesday that electronic voting wasn’t completely reliable and suggested that a backup paper system might be the only way to avoid another disputed presidential election in November.

But the chairman of the commission said he didn’t expect the bipartisan panel would issue national standards requiring paper receipts when it made preliminary recommendations next week, followed by more detailed guidelines next month.

“We will not decide on what machines people will buy,” said Republican DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly created U.S. Election Assistance Commission, saying it wasn’t the panel’s role to tell states what to do.

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At least 20 states are considering legislation to require a paper record of every vote cast after rushing to get ATM-like voting machines to replace paper ballots after Florida’s fiasco with hanging chads in the 2000 presidential election. About 50 million people, or 29% of voters, are expected to vote electronically.

Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, summed up the testimony of several witnesses when he criticized electronic voting systems as highly vulnerable to hackers. “Not only have the vendors not implemented security safeguards that are possible, they have not even correctly implemented the ones that are easy,” he said.

Others argued that backing up electronic systems with paper ballots could be costly and create unnecessary confusion for voters and poll workers.

“We would be negligent in our duty if we foisted an untested and untried experiment upon the voters,” said Kathy Rogers, director of election administration for Georgia, which switched to electronic voting in 2002.

Congress created the commission under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which began distributing $3.9 billion to states to upgrade voting systems after the disputed 2000 election.

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