Hopefully the State Board of Elections has the wisdom to see this effort to decertify voting equipment based on published bogus “research” is a serious affront to the integrity and reputation of the elections community and the citizens of the Commonwealth.

The April Fool’s day press release was nothing less than a reckless and shameful attempt to cast dispersions on Virginia Elections and for what gain? Is it possible that this is really all about a personal vendetta? Can one person singlehandedly destroy the hard work of thousands of Virginian sworn to uphold the integrity of elections in Virginia?

What is driving this rush to judgement? The published reports lead one to believe they are nothing more than an attempt at a reason to support a predetermined conclusion. The reports appear to have begun with a conclusion and the report was created to support it.

Touch screen voting equipment does a better job of capturing the voter intent than any paper based voting system. Not only is going to paper based voting a giant step backward technologically, more importantly it a giant step away from accurate elections.  The optical scan ballot voter’s intent is obfuscated by read errors and mismarked ballots by a range of 0.5% and higher. The so called advantage of a paper trail is notoriously fraught with errors with up to a 5% error rate with hand counted paper ballots. The Department of Elections is asking the SBE to trade in an accurate and reliable system for something much less so. Is this about honest and accurate elections, or is this train wreck about some other agenda?

Optical scan and digital scan voting systems use computer technology to tally the votes. This is the same type of computing that conspiracy theorists have used to condemn touch screen voting equipment. All of the conspiracy theories that apply to touch screen equally apply to optical scan. The idea that optical scan provides a paper back-up is negated by the fact that recount judges have always demanded the ballots merely be re-run through the computer one more time and have totally ignored the notoriously unreliable hand count approach.

I implore the State Board of Elections to choose to faithfully and impartially discharge all the duties incumbent them to do what is right for the citizens of the Commonwealth and prevent the Department of Elections from impugning the reputation of elections in Virginia.