"They did it once/they can do it again."
The Orlando Sentinel reported optically scanned ballots used in elections by all Florida counties give a "paper trail to nowhere," because by law only under and over votes get recounted by hand.
[When legislators passed the new law, they made no provision for a full hand recount, rendering the paper trail of optical-scan systems virtually useless. The law requires that only ballots with too many or too few marks -- so-called overvotes and undervotes -- be reviewed by hand. The rest won't be checked.
"By law, humans can't look at that paper record," said Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. "The system is sort of bass-ackwards..."
The state moved to optical-scan systems less than a year later -- but without any provision for a full hand recount of the paper ballots.
Instead, state law requires that any race decided by less than half a percentage point be subject to a machine recount. That means all the optical-scan ballots -- on which voters fill in a bubble or connect a broken arrow -- are run back through scanners to verify the totals.
If the margin then drops to one-quarter of a percent, a hand recount is ordered -- but only for ballots showing undervotes or overvotes.
The rest of the ballots can't be reviewed unless a candidate sues. And activists say that's a huge hole.]
Since the NY Times already identified at least 3 elections botched beyond belief or certainty as to identity of the individual who actually got the most votes, audit trails of paper ballots must become a priority in all states.
In the 2002 election for governor of Alabama, [Mr. Siegelman went to sleep on election night thinking he had won. But overnight, Republican Baldwin County reported that a glitch had given Mr. Siegelman, a Democrat, about 6,000 extra votes. When they were subtracted, Republican Rob Riley won by roughly 3,000 votes.
James Gundlach, a professor at Auburn University, crunched the numbers and concluded that Mr. Siegelman lost because of “electronic ballot stuffing,” possibly by an operative who accessed the computers and “edited” the results, though others dispute his analysis.
Baldwin County used paper ballots that were then read by an optical scan machine. Mr. Siegelman says local officials gave him permission to count the paper ballots by hand, but the attorney general threatened to arrest anyone who did. No count was done.
Lesson: Paper ballots alone are not enough. There must be strong audit laws that mandate comprehensive hand recounts when an election is close.]
emphasis added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31observer.html?ref=opinionileand]d
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