47. Require Paper Ballots

WHEREAS Honest, observable, and easily-verified public elections provide the foundation for our representative democracy and public confidence in our election system; and

WHEREAS the Association of Computing Machinery member poll indicates that 86% of these experts in the field of computer programming  agree that "...voting systems should enable each voter to inspect a physical (e.g., paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast, and to serve as an independent check on the result produced and stored by the system. Making those records permanent (e.g., not based in computer memory) provides a means by which an accurate recount may be conducted." and

WHEREAS Paper ballots can be securely stored and handled, and enable election observers to meaningfully witness election procedures and vote-counting and thereby detect, prevent, and correct errors or tampering; and

WHEREAS Paper ballots facilitate easy and observable recounts; and

WHEREAS Optical and similar scanners in the polling site would detect errors in ballot-marking such as overvotes, undervotes, and stray marks, and enable voters to correct such errors before their ballot is cast; and

WHEREAS It is in the public interest that the programming of any voting machine be done by bipartisan technical public employee staff, rather than corporations who use secret software where only vendors would fully know and understand what their electronic voting systems were doing; and

WHEREAS Voter and public confidence would be lowered by the use of electronic ballots which no voter or observer can witness, and electronic vote counts which no observer would be able to meaningfully observe; and

WHEREAS Computer security is difficult or impossible to achieve, as exemplified by the 40 million Mastercard accounts compromised in June, 2005, break-ins to computers used by the United States Department of Defense, and the other well-known problems with computer security; therefore

BE IT RESOLVED that the Maui County Democratic Party urges the State of Hawai`i to continue using paper ballots, precinct-based scanners, and

Resolved, That the Maui County Democratic Party urge the Federal Government to mandate the use of paper ballots in all elections.