A new state report finds that most Tennessee counties use inadequate machines for counting votes.
The Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, or TACIR, examined the state’s voting systems at the request of the General Assembly. It found that a paper trail is vital for ensuring that elections are tallied accurately. Right now, 93 of the state’s 95 counties use relatively new machines that record votes directly into a computer with no paper records. TACIR Researcher Rose Naccarato says at best, only 98 percent of the votes are counted, and any recounts consist of simply rerunning the same software.
“There’s no place in Tennessee where we can point and say, you know, ‘votes were lost here,’ or, ‘we know that this was hacked,’ or, ‘there were problems here,’ but it’s the nature of not having a paper trail and everything being done by the software that if it was happening you likely wouldn’t know.”
There are printers that can be added to the machines, but the TACIR study found problems with them: the printouts are unwieldy and difficult to understand, and because they print in order of voting, it’s possible to determine which voter cast each ballot.
TACIR recommends that the rest of the state follow the lead of Hamilton and Pickett counties. Voters there complete forms much like those used on standardized tests, using pencils to fill in circles. The state election commission estimates that it would cost a little more than 12 million dollars to switch the entire state to such optical scan systems, plus another 12 million for specialized equipment to help the disabled cast their ballots.
The report also suggests that a certain percentage of ballots in every election be recounted as a spot check. In the event of close races, TACIR recommends every vote be recounted.
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