VOTING  (CONT)

State and local officials have argued that it is too late to make many of the changes without creating chaos next year. Advocates for the blind and other disabled voters say better equipment needs to be developed to enable them to vote without help from poll workers, as federal law requires.

In trying to balance all the concerns, Mr. Hoyer and Mr. Holt decided to delay the most sweeping change, a requirement that every ballot be cast on an individual durable piece of paper, from next year to 2012.

To ensure that all machines would have some paper backup, they agreed to require hundreds of counties in 20 states to add cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen machines for 2008 and 2010. New York, which has delayed replacing its lever machines, would have to buy a new system by November 2008.

Advocates for the disabled praised the compromise. For many disabled people to vote independently, the advocates said, the touch-screen machines need to be modified to include audio files that can read back the completed ballots, while the ballot-marking devices used with the optical scanning systems have to be changed to feed ballots automatically.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, a group that helped broker the deal, said the bill offered hope for an end to "unaccountable, unverifiable and inaccessible voting."

Mr. Holt said the measure could "keep the country from going through another election where Americans doubt the results."
Critics say the California findings suggest that Congress should press for a quicker shift from the touch screens to optical scanning, in which voters mark paper ballots. Advocates of those systems say that the paper ballots would be less vulnerable to manipulation than the paper trails generated by the touch-screen computers and that they would hold up better for manual recounts.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.