In a House Appropriations hearing this week, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro Cortes (pictured at right) commented ‘this whole issue of a voter-verified, paper-audit trail is a solution in search of a problem.' As the individual charged with providing Pennsylvania’s voters with confidence in the electoral process this statement reveals a willful dismissal of the reality of elections in the state.

The Department of Elections appears to be spending more of their energy justifying the use of Diebold voting equipment than in running transparent, auditable elections. Cortes apparently has not done much of a search for “problems” to be solved by the “solution” of voter verified paper records.

Beaver County election officials have reported that since they began using DREs 8 years ago their undervote count has increased to about 6 times what it was when they used paper ballots. There were 820 presidential undervotes in 1996. In 1998, they began using the Unilect Patriot. Undervotes increased to 5,313 in 2000 and 4,551 in 2004, in spite of the fact that the DRE warns voters when they have not voted for a particular contest. In Mercer County in 2004, some touchscreen machines recorded presidential undervote rates as high as 83% and 8% countywide. In municipal elections in Montgomery County in 2005, three races were affected by lost votes on electronic voting machines. All these “problems” would be have been “solved” by the presence of a paper trail.

Then there's the problem that with touchscreen voting machines, there's no way to count votes without using software - software that is considered proprietary and hidden from public review. Election administrators no longer count votes - voting machine vendors count votes.