To: Stan Stanart, Harris County Clerk

From: Charlie Burrus, Harris County voter

Mr. Stanart,

Saturday as I was voting at my local Fiesta, I thought about how likely it was that we would have a blackout or brownout during the election. After all, I had gotten a text message from Centerpoint that morning advising me of the increased likelihood. It struck me that by using electronic machines with no paper trail, we are putting our election at risk of losing votes, and if there were to be a power outage, we wouldn't even know which votes we lost.

Adding to my unease, I then read Beth Clarkson's article "How trustworthy are electronic voting systems in the US?", where she specifically mentioned the Hart eSlate, which Harris County uses, as one of the machines that gave very suspicious results in the 2012 Ohio Presidential election. I don't believe that suspicious results (p-value of about 1 percent) are enough to cry foul, but I do believe that they are enough to warrant some sort of thorough investigation — an investigation that would be impossible without a paper trail. And with the increased incidence rate of hacking in the world, this problem is not going to go away; it is just going to get worse.

I ask that we in Harris County please begin using a machine that creates a paper receipt that the voter can verify. Hart advertises a Verified Ballot Option printer for the eSlate that does exactly this. Use of such a printer would set voters' minds at ease, since we would know that if an abnormality occurs, whether an act of nature or a suspected hacking, there would exist a physical paper trail that could act as a backup. The Verified Ballot Option printers create receipt-like papers that would not have any "hanging chad" problems that the old punch card ballots had. They would be easy to read, and the results would therefore be easy to verify, both individually by the voter and precinct-wide by election officials.

Thank you for your attention.

Charlie Burrus teaches math in a local public high school.

Bookmark Gray Matters. Its p-value is about 1 percent.