Letter to the Editor, April 27, 2006

To the Editor:

Your editorial of April 21 analyzed the current voting systems situation well, except for your comment, "We're satisfied that the county made every effort to satisfy the law," which could be interpreted to mean that the Bucks commissioners made the best choice possible.

The two Bucks County commissioners who voted for the Danaher voting system had a better choice available on the state-certified list, an optical scanner. The Danaher machine does not produce the voter-verified paper record that may be required by federal and state legislation in the future. The two commissioners could have satisfied the law and ensured that every vote is counted by choosing the optical scanner, which reads a paper ballot marked by the voter himself. Not only would they have chosen a less expensive, easier to use, and, more importantly, more secure and accurate voting system, but they also would have saved future taxpayer money when the voter-verified paper record legislation passes and the Danaher machines will need to be replaced.

In the meantime, voters may have some of their votes lost because of a design flaw in the Danaher. In my last letter, I described how one out of twenty votes for president was lost in New Mexico in 2004 on the Danaher machine because the voter's choice for president was erased if he pressed the button next to Bush's or Kerry's name after he had already chosen the straight party ticket option.

While attending the re-examination of the similar Sequoia machine last week, I learned that choosing the straight party voting option and then pressing a button next to a candidate's name on the Danaher machine has a different result in Pennsylvania. Because of the Pennsylvania method of straight party voting, unique in the nation, the vote for the candidate chosen would remain; however, in offices for which the voter chooses more than one candidate, as for county commissioner, votes would be erased. This could affect the county commissioner election in 2007, for example.

Let's hope that by then we will have a voting system that allows the voter to mark his choices himself, instead of having a voting machine stand in the way of his vote being registered and counted correctly.

Madeline Rawley

Doylestown Township