80th Legislature: Pena Files Bill ‘Paper Trail’ Bill
Vince Leibowitz | Nov 13, 2006 | Comments 1
State Rep. Aaron Pena (D-Edinburg) has filed what could be the single-most important piece of legislation to be considered by the Texas Legislature in the 80th Session: A bill requiring a paper audit trail for electronic voting systems.
Right up there with the appropriations bill and raising the minimum wage is the issue of making sure that Texas’ electronic voting systems offer a verifiable paper trail.
Pena’s bill, HB 123, would amend Section 129.002 of the Texas Election Code to require that direct recording electronic voting machines may not be used unless they have been certified or approved by a nationally recognized testing lab, have met or exceeded the minimum requirements set by the Federal Election Commission, and creates “a contemporaneous auditable paper record copy of each electronic ballot that allows a voter to confirm the choices the voter made through both a visual and a nonvisual method, such as through an audio component, before the voter casts the ballot.”
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Filed Under: Texas Legislature
This is not helpful…not at all. This gets exactly the same situation that Gore and Kerry faced–paper vote totals hidden by machine tallies. And, when challenged for more observably accurate handcounts, the clock is run out so that it becomes mute (Kerry’s votes are still not counted in Ohio even after 2 years…so slow on purpose). And, it does not abide by the Texas Constitution for observably honest elections with numbered ballots. It does not pass any test on the face of it.