VOTE CALIFORNIA - Thumbs Up for California and Its Voters

This may be old news but worth noting as an example for other states.

"California Election to Provide E-voting Paper Trail" by MARC L. SONGINI, Computerworld

June 05, 2006 -- California tomorrow will become one of the first states to require that all voting machines produce a paper audit trail that can verify the accuracy of a tally.

The audit trail is required for Tuesday's primary vote to ensure that election officials adhere to a state law passed in 2005. The statute requires that the ballots of 1% of the votes cast in each precinct be manually tallied to ensure the accuracy of e-voting systems.

The new law expands on an earlier statute that requires voters using optical scan devices to also register their votes on paper so they can be audited. Now, all machines, including touch-screen systems, must compile a paper trail of votes.

"Every voting system in California will have a paper trail in 2006," the spokeswoman said. "Voters will have the opportunity to verify their vote via a paper record, which verifies that their vote cast was indeed the vote that was recorded."

Haas (Mikel Haas, Registrar of Voters) noted that the statute doesn't require that voters receive personal paper confirmation of their vote. It only requires that a printed record be retained in the voting machine for use in audits.

This is good news on the voter protection issue. The one fault I see, if you require a printed record for audits, why not give a copy to the voter?