EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Sanford Morganstein
Organization : | Populex Corporation
Post Date : | 8/26/2005
General Comments
Comment : | In our opinion, it is not advisable to place requirements needed for a concomitant, tangible, paper DRE record on all systems that produce a permanent record. Our system, and systems made by our competitors, produces a permanent tangible record of the voter’s intent. It is the one-and-only record of the voter’s intent although when ballots are tabulated other records of individual ballots could be made on the tabulation equipment. Requiring that those computerized systems that simply create Comments on VVSG Page 2 a marked ballot must have a concomitant per-voter, contemporaneous, electronic record will cause confusion and inefficiency for election jurisdictions. Since we do not believe that this was the intent of the TGDC, we will not belabor the point, but if the EAC or NIST would like further information on the inadvisability of such a concomitant record in the case of ballot marking systems, we will be most pleased to supplement our comments whenever asked. Simply put now, there is no need for a secure paper path and means for prohibiting touching of paper audit trails in systems that produce a voter verified paper ballot. We believe that such constraints are inadvisable