It passed 45-5. It spells the end of touchscreen voting in Iowa, since current equipment can be replaced only with scannable paper ballot systems. That's good news. Unfortunately there's more. The bill allows the new paper trail to be "machine readable" as well as visually readable by real people. This opens the door to misuse of the paper trail, wherein one set of software creates the trail and another set of software reads it. If no one's eyes are ever employed to examine the paper and compare it to the alleged vote tally, we are hardly better off than we were.

Labels: voting