On July 7, the Obion County, Tennessee, Election Commission voted to sue the state of Tennessee. The county is upset because state law requires all counties, starting in 2010, to use vote-counting machines that have a paper trail. Obion County currently uses touch screen machines that have no paper trail. See this article. The county’s claim that no optical scan ballot system is available is puzzling, since hundreds of counties around the U.S. use optical scan ballots. Optical scan ballots are paper ballots that are read by scanning machines, so obviously optical scan ballots do leave a paper trail. They can be recounted by hand if necessary.
Perhaps Obion County is populated by Outer Space folks NOT connected to 2009 or Mother Earth — i.e. in some sort of different universe ???
Maybe its a difference of opinion. Do the ballot readers leave a trail saying ballot number XXX voted this way or that way?
How a ballot is read and how someone marked it is two different things.
So who is the rent-seeking vendor for those touch screen machines? Makes one wonder what may being going on under the table.
Scanners and accumulator software can and do misread ballots. However, there is a paper original to check. Why not just count by hand publicly at the polling station AND scan? What to do and has been done with all those touch screen machines? Another bailout?
The rub here is that the new TN law requires voting systems to conform to the version of the EAC’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines in effect at the time of passage. That would be the 2005 VVSG right now and there currently are no systems that have made it through the new EAC certification process certified to those standards (as far as I know). One quirk is that a difference of interpretation might properly find the 2002 VVSG the relevant set of standards… and then TN would have nothing to complain about because there are many systems certified to those standards.
Here is a somewhat different take on the law, in which the Secretary of State agrees that the new law is impossible to comply with.
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090708/NEWS0201/907080391/1003/BUSINESS