Officials warn against rush to back up electronic ballots

WASHINGTON -- Retrofitting electronic voting machines with paper receipts in time for this year's presidential election would cause chaos far worse than the security concerns it is intended to address, election officials said yesterday in the first hearing of the federal Election Assistance Commission.

The receipts have been sought as a backstop against computer errors, crashes, or tampering. The seven-hour hearing -- the first of the new commission, formed in the wake of the controversy over the presidential recount in 2000 -- brought together computer specialists, election officials, and advocacy groups to begin work on a national policy on electronic voting security.

Waving a 37-inch-long receipt that would be needed for each voter on a complicated ballot, Los Angeles election chief Conny McCormack said making voters pore over the cryptic printout with small type would guarantee confusion. ''Touch screens have a proven track record of doing the best job," she said. ''Voters are confident in these systems. There's only a tiny, vocal minority making false claims to the contrary."

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, however, disputed McCormack's claim, saying he followed the unanimous recommendation of his policy panel when he decertified touch-screen equipment last week. ''I would not base my decision on the false claims of a tiny minority," he said.

Congress is also considering several proposals, including one by Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, that would mandate paper receipts for electronic machines in this November's election. Holt appeared outside the hearing, joined by supporters from TrueMajority, Common Cause, and TrueVoteMD, which are demanding the paper receipts, and said pressure from such grass-roots groups is giving momentum to reforms. Paper receipts, he said, ''could be ready for this year's election."

Shelley urged the commission to join him in immediately setting standards for the paper printouts. The commissioners have focused on procedures designed to avoid the kind of chaos that occurred in Florida four years ago, but said before the hearing they had no intention of trying to move as quickly as Shelley urged.

Civic groups split over paper printouts. Common Cause and the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation testified in favor of receipts to restore confidence in elections. But the National Council of La Raza, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of People With Disabilities all said that electronic voting reduces voter error and helps the disabled and people who don't speak English. Adding the unproven and relatively untested paper receipts could drive away such groups, they said.

Commissioners expressed concerns about the behind-the-scenes power of equipment vendors.

Chairman DeForest ''Buster" Soaries Jr. noted that the chief executive officer of Diebold Election Systems, a major provider of election equipment, had pledged in a Republican fund-raising letter last year that he was ''committed" to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to President Bush.

Spokesmen for the companies and many election officials said there are enough checks and balances in the current system.