Pennsylvania, State of Denial

By Marybeth Kuznik, VotePA. Posted April 2, 2008.

With the national spotlight on The Keystone State's April 22 Primary, many heads remain buried in sand when it comes to electronic voting.

In March 2004, Governor Ed Rendell announced a new tourism slogan for Pennsylvania: "The State of Independence". But with Pennsylvania officials continuing along in what seems to be mindless oblivion to the dangers of paperless electronic voting machines, perhaps Pennsylvania's slogan should be "The State of Denial" when it comes to elections.

Following the inconclusive Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries earlier this month, the national spotlight turned swiftly to Pennsylvania's April 22 election as the next battleground. And in the glare of that white-hot national spotlight it is more apparent than ever that there is great risk for electoral disaster in The Keystone State.

With fifty-one of its most populous counties still voting on completely paperless Direct Record Electronic machines, Pennsylvania remains one of the last twelve states to have passed no law requiring every vote to be backed up with a voter-verified paper record or ballot.

Time and time again Pennsylvania has had to replace failed electronic voting machines, bailing out counties and vendors at taxpayer expense. Pennsylvania has been plagued with a rash of problems caused by failures of paperless, unverifiable voting machines. These problems have ranged from extremely high levels of undervotes (indicating a large number of voters are not having their votes counted), to faulty programming and ballot preparation, to outright loss of votes due to machines being set up improperly on Election Day.

With huge party machine politics entrenched on both the Republican and Democratic sides, Pennsylvania had a long history of election irregularities and difficulties long before the rise of electronic voting. And although one of the state's most prominent suppliers of voting machines and supplies was convicted of election fraud, the paperless electronic voting machines his company originally developed continue to count the votes of nearly two and a half million Pennsylvanians to this very day.

But despite past problems and current warnings from computer scientists and neighboring states, Pennsylvania officials from County Commissioners and Election Directors to the Governor himself inexplicably continue to embrace paperless electronic voting. Their public mantra is that Pennsylvania elections on paperless electronic machines are secure and accurate.

How did The Keystone State become The State of Denial? To understand better, one first needs to look at Pennsylvania itself.

Physically located at the junction of our Northeast, Midwest, and Southern regions, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania embodies many cultures and ideologies. The electorate is made up of diverse populations including high-tech and well educated professionals, old-time second and third generation immigrant working classes that formerly worked in the state's mines and mills, farmers and other rural citizens (agriculture is Pennsylvania's #1 industry), and new immigrant communities. While traditionally moderate-to-liberal major cities dominate the southwest and southeast corners of the state, conservative politics have long been the tradition in the northern and central regions. This "red" area of the state, known as "The T" due to its T shape on a map, is what sparked James Carville's famous description of Pennsylvania as "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle".

Pennsylvania has over 8 million registered voters as of November 2007. The state is almost evenly divided politically, with 3,883,378 Democratic voters and 3,245,271 Republicans, while 984,349 voters remain non-partisan or are members of other political parties.

With very close political registration numbers like this, and the long-standing balance and tensions between The Cities and The T, Pennsylvania is known as one of the most swinging of the swing states when it comes to voting. For decades Keystone State voters have flipped the Governorship back and forth between the two major parties like clockwork every 8 years. With Ed Rendell the current (Democratic) Governor, Pennsylvania's full-time General Assembly now contains a Republican majority in its Senate and a one-vote Democratic majority in the House, which due to a rather unprecedented compromise is led by a Republican Speaker.

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