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West Virginia Snapshot

West Virginia law requires voter-verifiable paper records on all voting systems, and a manual count of 5% of precincts is required as part of the canvass under §3-4A-28(d) of the West Virginia Code. ES&S is the only vendor currently providing equipment in West Virginia.

According to the Secretary of State's web page, 34 counties, with almost 59% of the state's registered voters, live in counties in which the only voting system for polling-place voting is the ES&S iVotronic DRE.
In 15 counties, the iVotronic is used for accessibility at the polls, but the primary system is centrally counted optical scan ballots, with the M650 counting the paper ballots. About 21% of the voters live in these counties.
2 counties use hand-counted paper ballots, with the iVotronic for accessibility.
4 counties use optical scan systems, with the AutoMARK ballot-marking device used for accessibility. Only two of these counties, Putnam and Kanawha Counties, possess precinct-count scanners. The largest of these four, Kanawha County, is also the largest in the state, with over 130,000 voters. Kanawha uses the iVotronic for accessibility at the polling place, but the AutoMARK for early voting.

In all, it seems fair to estimate that the majority of votes cast in the primary will be cast on the iVotronic. Mail-in absentee balloting requires an excuse, so the vast majority of votes in the DRE counties will, in fact, be cast on the iVotronic.

As we have noted in previous state snapshots, the paper trail for the iVotronic, known as the Real Time Audit Log (RTAL), has been the subject of some criticism for its design. Printer jams have also occurred with the RTAL, compromising about 9% of the machines in Guilford County, NC in the 2006 general election. The Ohio EVEREST review Academic Team report (p. 94) noted a risk that even voters careful to check the RTAL might not notice if their vote was cancelled quickly after printing. Combined with the severe security vulnerabilities of the machines, this is a serious concern.

The West Virginia Secretary of State's office reports that as of April 25, West Virginia has 1,183,495 registered voters (pdf link). Each party's primary will be open to independents and to members of that party. The Secretary of State reports that there are 665,234 registered Democrats, 347,760 Republicans, 156,199 voters registered with no party, and the remainder scattered among small parties. The in-person early voting period ran from April 23 - May 10.

Verified Voting: Mandatory Manual Audits of Voter-Verified Paper Records

The map below shows progress to date in our campaign for verifiable elections. Step 1 of our strategy has been to make sure that there is a paper record of every vote and that voters are able to verify the accuracy of that record before the ballot is cast (that paper record is called a "Voter-Verified Paper Record" or VVPR).

VerifiedVoting.org, our partners, and voters across the country have successfully persuaded the majority of state governments to pass legislation or establish regulations to require VVPR. 28 states, with more than half the U.S. population, now have such a requirement. We need your help to make sure the voters in the remaining 22 states are protected, through Federal or state legislation.

But we need to do even more to ensure that the results of elections are verifiable. Voter-verified paper records are most effective when used as the basis for mandatory manual audits in randomly selected precincts. Step 2 of our strategy is to encourage states to adopt laws or regulations requiring such mandatory manual audits of the VVPRs. As the map below shows, 13 states have such a requirement now. We need your help to pass laws in the remaining 37 states to require such audits.

Help us complete the legislative push toward reliable, secure, verifiable, and transparent elections! Please visit our action center (click here) to turn the whole country green with voter-verified paper records and mandatory manual audits of those records. Click on the map to see our legislation tracking web page.

VVPR AND MANDATORY MANUAL AUDITS

*Map Legend*
	VVPR + manual audits required (17)
	VVPR required; No audit requirement (13)
	VVPR not required but in use statewide; No audit requirement (8)
	No VVPR requirement; No audit requirement (12)

The Good News (Really) About Voting Machines

by Adam Cohen, The New York Times, January 10th, 2007

In the summer of 2004, I attended a national meeting of state election directors, and one of the biggest laugh lines was how activists were demanding that electronic voting machines produce a paper record of every vote cast.

An election official stood in front of the group, produced a roll of paper and started to unroll it while saying, to the delight of many in the audience, that the paper record would have to be mighty long to record all of the votes on a California ballot. Ha! Ha! Ridiculous!

The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nuts who hate electronic voting could complain all they wanted, the consensus in the room seemed to be, but paper records for electronic voting were impractical and unnecessary, and they were not going to happen.

What a difference two years makes.

Today, 27 states — including such large ones as California, New York, Illinois and Ohio — require electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified paper trail. There is paper-trail legislation pending in a dozen more states. Read more...

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