by Stephen Pate

Created on: January 05, 2010   Last Updated: January 06, 2010

Can U.S. voters trust the processes for counting election votes? No, I don’t think so. While we have taken a lot of steps since the 2000 U.S. presidential election to ensure voter confidence, we still have a long way to go to better practically ensure fairness to voters.

One of the major problems of national elections is that there are no standards for elections on the federal level. U.S. election laws are determined by the states. This means there’s no overarching authority to define how federal elections will be done.

This led to a contention of the presidential election in 2000, in which Florida used paper “butterfly ballots” to record votes. Because of the layout of the ballot, a majority of older voters became confused as to who they were really voting for, and led to overvoting or undervoting on many ballots. 

This led to a highly contentious election that year which ended only because of a ruling from the Supreme Court.

Since then, there have been movements away from paper ballots to electronic voting machines. The argument is that electronic voting machines would be easier to understand by voters and thus we would never again have the problem that we had with Bush v. Gore. However, there are problems inherent with electronic voting methods.

The primary problem is how easily it could be to enact voter fraud. Without a paper trail, electronic voting machines can have hidden programs that could cause voter fraud. 

Even though a voter chooses the candidate he wants, a program in the machine could still register the vote for someone else. There is no way to ensure a proper vote is registered without a paper trail.

This is why a paper trail is still important. While electronic voting can lead to quick counting, a paper trail can lead to accurate counts. Should the electronic count be suspect, a paper ballot included will verify an election. There are two ways such an electronic voting machine can work. 

Either a paper ballot will be filled in by a voter and scanned for an electronic record or an electronic voting machine is used that prints out the voter’s chosen candidates as a paper record. Whichever method is used, it combines the quickness of electronic voting with the redundancy of a paper ballot.

But election laws are made by the states, not the federal government. Which is why we do not have unified national standards to prevent electoral fraud

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