Winston County Circuit Clerk Kim Ming, the Winston County Board of Supervisors and the Winston County Election Commissioners should be commended for acquiring and changing Winston County’s voting system to a paper ballot system.
The new paper ballot system that started with the August 6 primary in Winston County is rated the top system in the country by security experts. Voters mark their choices on a paper ballot, which is then scanned to quickly tabulate the results. If the scanners break down or questions are raised about their accuracy, the paper ballots can be hand-counted to verify the totals. This system is similar to the system that a MIT team and several other election security experts recommended to the State of Georgia.
Sixty-nine of Mississippi’s 82 counties use the outdated touchscreen voting machines. All but one of these 69 counties removed — with the consent of the U.S. Justice Department and the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office — the external printers with which the touchscreen machines were initially equipped.
That has proven to be a huge mistake by all parties. They have traded the inconvenience of dealing with balky printers for the uncertainty of knowing whether a voter’s preferences are recorded accurately and in full. This became a big problem in the August 27 gubernatorial Republican runoff election, where there were reports of machines switching the voter’s choice to a different candidate. One video of the incident created national news coverage.
Whether the touchscreens malfunction or are hacked, the paper ballot system of Winston County is safer and more secure. There are already plenty of legitimate worries about Russian or other foreign efforts to mess with the country’s elections. Even if hackers are not successful at breaking into the voting systems, the voters’ trust in the ballot results — an essential element in preserving democracy — is going to erode if there is no way to compare what’s recorded on a voting machine’s memory chip against a paper record the voters themselves reviewed when they cast their ballot.
An even greater danger is that, as these touchscreen machines age, they are going to develop problems, just as any computer does. There have been demonstrated cases where electronic voting machines have crashed and lost their records. Without a backup paper trail, there is no way to recreate the votes that have disappeared.
It is past time for Mississippi and the other 69 counties to follow Winston County’s example and retire these old machines and switch to a voter marked paper ballots. In addition to being more efficient and cost-effective, paper ballot -based voting systems are more secure from cyber-attacks as the paper ballot itself is the record for how the voter cast their ballot.
Editor’s note: Joseph McCain is the publisher of The Choctaw Plaindealer, The Webster Progress Times and Winston County Journal. He maybe reached at newsroom@winston countyjournal.com or 662-803-5236.
