Voter verified paper trail is necessary to protect integrity of elections

Statement of Common Cause President Chellie Pingree

Common Cause strongly supports requiring a voter verified paper audit trail for all voting systems, and believes that the goal of every election official in this country should be to ensure that a paper trail exists for each person who casts a vote.

Too many questions have been raised about the reliability, accuracy and security of electronic touch-screen voting machines for a voter to cast a ballot without the assurance of a paper receipt.

What’s more, many questions have been raised about the careless procedures and overtly partisan activities of some voting machine vendors, who must be held to a far higher standard of accountability and transparency.

Common Cause shares the concerns of those who have worked to assure that all Americans have the right to vote, have equal access to voting and have the right to vote in private. But no person’s right to vote has meaning if the voter cannot be reasonably assured that their vote was counted as cast.

There are few more fundamentally important functions of the government in our democracy than providing a fair, secure, convenient and accessible voting system. We urge the Election Assistance Commission move quickly to ensure that our voting technology has the confidence of voters so that we can begin to restore some of the public’s loss of trust in our democracy that was so damaged in the 2000 presidential election.