Ohio HB 262 Passes, voter-verified paper audit trails to be required

Good news!

A State of Ohio bill requiring voter-verified paper audit trails
(VVPATs) has passed in the state Senate and House, it will next go to
Governor Taft to be signed into law. The bill can be found here:

http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/BillText125/125_HB_262_PS_N.html

Secretary of State Ken Blackwell is probably not happy with this
development. Despite a lack of supporting evidence, he stuck to neocon
dogma that claimed VVPATs would allow for vote-buying, were costly to
implement, impractical and unnecessary. Cincinnati's largest newspaper,
The Enquirer, tried to influence public perception of the law here in
my home town by publishing a disinformation editorial piece entitled
"Paper receipts make for risky voting", trying to persuade my neighbors
that VVPATs would put everyone's vote on an auction block:

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/04/11/editorial_ed1b.html

Despite the fact that all branches of Ohio's state government are
dominated by conservative majorities, the bill gained wide-spread
support. I know that several people including myself wrote to Governor
Taft, Secretary Blackwell and their local representatives to dispel the
mythology of the vote-buying disinformation tactic, so perhaps logic
prevailed in this case.

A point of discussion which may have helped here in Ohio: Many comments
I've read that supported HB 262 reminded those in power that when
corporations control vote counting, the corporations are in the
position of power, not the politicians. So when it monetarily benefits
the corporations to switch party affiliations, they will do so.
Politicians which have lost corporate backing will never have the
opportunity to know if they really lost an election without VVPATs. It
may be worth bringing this point up in other areas where similar bills
are being written, or even at the national level.

In any event, this is a victory for election believability in Ohio. The
devil is in the details of course, implementation specifics aren't
fully fleshed out, so there will be more battles to fight and
disinformation to refute. But this puts a serious crimp in the plans of
black box voting machine manufacturers like Ohio's own Diebold. These
companies have been doing everything they can can to avoid
accountability or allow for audits, and I for one am glad that they
were overruled. I hope that this indicates a larger trend in
conservative areas of country where calls for electronic voting audit
capabilities are too nonpartisan to be ignored.

Cheers,
Troy Davis
President, Cincinnati Programmers Guild
http://cincypg.org

__________________
Troy Davis
Interactive Engineer
Metaphor Studio
538 Reading Road
Loft 200
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

Tel: 513-723-0290
Fax: 513-723-0670
http://metaphorstudio.com
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Received on Sat Jul 31 23:17:04 2004