Snyder County Commissioners are making arrangements to demonstrate new models of voting machines that will cost taxpayers about $250,000.
Under a proposal by Gov. Tom Wolf, the state would cover about half the cost, so Snyder County is setting aside about $125,000 in the 2019 county budget to pay for machines similar to the models that will be on display Feb. 7 at the courthouse.
But some, including Snyder County Commissioner Joe Kantz, are asking why the county should buy something it probably doesn’t need.
The purchase preparations follow a directive from the governor, who ordered all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to buy new voting machines that leave a paper trail as a safeguard against hacking prior to the 2020 presidential election. The governor is asking the state Legislature to cover half of the costs.
The issue is that Snyder, Montour and 16 other counties use voting systems that come with the ultimate paper trail — voters mark paper ballots.
Those paper ballots are then loaded into an optical scan machine which simply counts them and prints out the totals. If necessary, people could count the votes. They are right there on the ballots.
The governor’s concern for the accuracy, validity and sanctity of Pennsylvania’s elections is justified. Pennsylvania is one of 13 states where voters in a majority of counties use antiquated machines that store votes electronically without printed ballots or other paper-based backups that could be used to double-check the vote, according to researchers at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
The directive came after the commonwealth settled a lawsuit accusing Pennsylvania of potentially violating the constitutional rights of voters if it continued using voting machines that were susceptible to hacking. As part of the settlement, the Wolf administration formalized a commitment to ensuring every Pennsylvania voter uses a “voter-verifiable paper ballot” in 2020.
It appears that new voting machines are necessary to achieve these standards in many counties, but, as many argue, perhaps not in 18 counties, including Snyder and Montour, where the voting remains on paper ballots.
Before the taxpayers of these counties are forced into an expensive purchase, the state should dispatch experts in automated voting technology to counties using these paper-based systems.
Working under the authority of the commonwealth, they could examine the full voting and tallying procedure and either certify the existing process as safe and verifiable or explain to the taxpayers why it would be necessary to buy new machines to generate a “voter-verifiable paper ballot.”
