New Jersey officials promised years ago to retrofit the state's beleaguered electronic voting machines with verifiable paper records. But now that lawmakers have put off the implausible project for a third time, it looks more than ever like a figment of the political imagination.
State officials say they don't have the roughly $20 million needed to fix the machines in the current climate. They're probably right. But if they ever do come up with the money, they should use it to buy new machines instead.
It's beyond clear now that the Sequoia Voting Systems machines in use in most New Jersey counties - and some in Pennsylvania, including Montgomery County - were an expensive mistake at best.
Philadelphia election officials' diligence in inspecting their ATM-style machines has kept voting problems to a minimum, but paper backup is generally considered a standard feature of secure, reliable voting.
Many states have abandoned the kind of machine being used in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and only seven still have paperless voting. Many experts and officials prefer the so-called optical-scan method often used for multiple-choice tests. Voters mark their choices on paper ballots that are read electronically but available for manual recounting.
Even as New Jersey officials resist a nationwide tide against paperless voting, the Sequoia machines are on trial in Trenton. Plaintiffs in a civil suit allege that the machines are inaccurate and vulnerable to tampering. Their claims are based partly on the alarming findings of a Princeton computer-science professor who said he hacked the machines with relative ease.
New Jersey lawmakers voted in 2005 to require that the state's voting machines produce a paper trail for verification purposes. That was good policy, given the host of valid concerns about the security and reliability of touch-screen machines.
But officials failed to realize then and ever since that complying with the policy requires new machines. Instead, they vowed to bring flawed machines in line with the policy, using technology that didn't exist.