Letter to the editor: Paper ballots best way to vote
Several citizens attended the Aug. 27 Westmoreland County commissioners’ public meeting, requesting expert-recommended paper ballot use instead of voting machines.
In March 2024, after studying paper ballot and voting machine security for 20 years, Princeton’s Dr. Andrew Appel and two additional cybersecurity experts testified before the Pennsylvania Senate regarding voting machine security vulnerability: “Some voting machines encode the votes on the printed ballot using a barcode. … The voter has no way of knowing whether the barcode correctly records the candidates they chose.”
They further testified, “There’s a clear consensus among experts in the cybersecurity of voting that public elections should be conducted using hand-marked paper ballots.” Because paper ballots have no barcode, scanners can only tabulate the hand-marked chosen candidates’ names.
Interesting tidbit: For every election, emergency paper ballots are printed, used only during machine malfunction. If not used, paper and money are wasted. Regular paper ballots eliminate needing emergency ballots.
With paper ballots, we win three ways: We’ve insured a more secure election per cybersecurity experts, voters feel confident seeing their personally hand-marked candidate, and we’re environmentally conscientious by not wasting paper on usually unnecessary ballots.
Smarter voting? Absolutely!
Mary Turka
Murrysville
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.