PA Lawsuit Seeks Paper Trail for Election Day

Paul Muschick / The Morning Call / August 15, 2006
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PHILADELPHIA -- -- Twenty-five voters from across Pennsylvania sued the state today seeking to stop the use of electronic voting machines that do not provide back up paper records. The records are necessary for people to verify that their votes were accurately recorded, attorneys said at a news conference at the Philadelphia offices of Drinker Biddle & Reath, one of the law firms representing the plaintiffs in the suit. The suit aims to force counties to have systems in place for the November election that would have a paper record.

The lawyers pointed to flaws with machines in several counties, including Berks County, that showed the machines are not trustworthy. In the May 2005 primary, machines in four Berks precincts failed to record votes because of programming errors.
The suit, filed in Commonwealth Court, could affect voting systems in 57 counties, including Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Bucks, Montgomery, Monroe, Carbon and Schuylkill. The voters filing the suit include two from the Lehigh Valley - Alan Brau, a physician from Hanover Township, Northampton County, and Cathy Reed of Allentown. Counties nationwide have been moving to computerized, or electronic, voting because of a federal mandate to avoid the kinds of vote-counting problems experienced in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.