paper trails

The Times comments, today, on North Carolina's Ag Commissioner. Well, the lack thereof.

When the returns came in for the agriculture commissioner race, two things were clear: the Republican, Steve Troxler, and the Democrat, Britt Cobb, were just 2,287 votes apart, and a voting machine in Carteret County had lost 4,438 votes. The machine had mistakenly been set to keep roughly 3,000 votes in its memory, which was not enough. And in a spectacularly poor design decision, it was programmed to let people keep "voting" even when their votes were not being saved.

The editorial rightly uses this as another call for paper trails. It might be the old fashioned and it might be the paranoid in me--the part of me that checks to see the letter went down the mail shoot and that my keys are still in my pocket--but having some fairly hard-copy record of a vote just makes sense. The Times:

North Carolina's plight underscores a basic point about elections: because there are often problems, there must be a mechanism for a recount. If the Carteret County voting machine had produced a voter-verified paper record each time a vote was cast, these paper records could have been be counted and the matter would be resolved. But electronic voting machines that do not produce paper records make recounts impossible.