Santa Clara County, California, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has decided that their new electronic voting machines must offer voter-checkable audit records. An AP story at the New York Times reports that the vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, will add paper receipt printers to their machines to accomodate the county.
This looks like a victory for the campaign by computer scientists against e-voting systems that don’t offer such paper records. Now we’ll see what we can do here in Mercer County, New Jersey.
UPDATE (7:30 PM): Kim Alexander at the California Voter Foundation offers a more detailed (and nuanced) description of Santa Clara County’s decision. (Thanks to Jim Tyre for the pointer.)
