against that such systems in NC.
had initially convinced the lawmakers to do so.
law so that he could keep him on. We call that the
and they still shoved that idea down the tubes.
that counties may choose.
often to the NC legislature to oppose us.
This is what activists are up against in states that have anti paper election officials
August 11, 2005 (2 days before our law was passed)
George Gilbert: "I’m George Gilbert, and I am representing the Guilford County Board of Elections here today.
I’ve been Director of Elections in Guilford County for 17 years, and
we’ve used DRE equipment for 17 years in Guilford County. And I’m here basically not on a matter of policy but on a matter of practical applications.
I want you all to at least see one time what you’re looking at. (He holds up long tape.)
This is a voter verifiable paper tape produced from one of the vendors that is currently having their system certified.
Here’s a single ballot. This ballot over here contains 55 votes, and so a fairly good-sized roll of paper.
I’m not sure now we would handle it if we had to do a manual recount, but I’m sure we would find a way.
I would have 3,545 of those tapes that size if I had had this system in place in 2004 in Guilford County.
I did a recount a recount of our 194,000 ballot records.
That is the individual ballot records for each voter in our electronic backup system last year when we had our recounts.
It took me 14 seconds to do that recount.
You can think about what it would take to manually recount 200,000 pieces of paper.
Optical-scan ballots. Some are clear; some are very ambiguous. You saw what Florida did in 2000, which is really why we’re here.
Florida now bans the manual counting paper ballots.
They learned their lesson. The State of Washington last year went through this.
Finally certified their governor’s race.
It cost them not quite a million dollars to conduct that manual recount
of one statewide race.
Well we conducted a recount of two statewide races last year.
If we had to do that manually on paper, it would have run us
roughly $2.4 million to conduct that recount using the exact same cost
figures that they had in the State of Washington.
The final thing is that I don’t know if there’s anyone left that
honestly believes that North Carolina precinct officials
or public officials can manually count 3.5 million ballots on paper accurately.
They might be able to do it one time. They might not get it right the next time.
You would have literally thousands and thousands of people sitting
there looking these documents trying to coordinate what they’re doing—
trying to get it to add up properly.
There’s no way to test the accuracy of manual counting;
there is no way to verify the accuracy of manual counting.
All you can do is do it again, and you don’t know which errors
you made the first time or the second time.
I can test electronic tabulating. It tests in a lot of different ways,
and I’ve tested manual tabulations.
We did it for over a hundred years in this country, and we’ve spent
the last hundred years trying to find better systems to replace
manual tabulation of paper ballots.
We haven’t gotten it perfect.
Probably the most frequently used cliché in elections is
there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system.
The paper certainly is not it."http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/HouseElectLawAug10Gilbert.doc This is typical of what we were up against, and what we will be up against again.We have had to rebut this guy time after time after time.
This election director bought the DREs with the flimsy paper trail, because he WANTED them to fail.
Gilbert also brought a VoteHERE device with him to this meeting and showed it to the lawmakers. ***We must take a look at the situation at hand and ask ourselves, do we really think
that the EAC and others are going to do the right thing?