The Concerned Voters of Centre County have been lobbying officials to ban touchscreen voting machines before the May 15 municipal election, and now they could get their wish on a much bigger level.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) brought the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act to the House of Representatives this week.

The proposed bill would require voter-verified paper ballots to back up electronic vote casting, random audits to assure accuracy and inspections of voting software, Holt's communications director Matt Dennis said. The legislation also calls for federal funding to support these new requirements.

Holt's bill was rejected twice before, first in 2003 and again after being reintroduced in 2005, Dennis said.

"The situation with Florida's 2006 election, where 18,000 electronic votes went unrecorded, has opened a lot of people's eyes," Dennis said. "Plus, the new Democratic Congress is more willing to admit there is a problem with unverifiable voting systems."

Dennis said if Holt's legislation is passed, the paper backup would be the ballot of record in the event of a recount.

Centre County Republicans chairman G.T. Thompson said he would like to see a backup for the touchscreen machines but does not think they pose any more of a risk than paper ballots.

"The fear is that a paper record could be used to identify how a person voted," Thompson said. "Touchscreens are good sound technology with an internal back up system."

Dianne Gregg of the Centre County Democrats could not be reached for comment.

The Pennsylvania department of state press secretary Leslie Amoros said the problem with paper trails is maintaining secrecy.

"The department is not opposed to verifiable paper trails, but to date we have not reviewed a system that meets the Constitutional requirement of secrecy of the ballots," she said.

Bob Brownlee, a member of the Concerned Voters of Centre County, said the legislation is important on a local level as well because the current systems in Centre County provides absolutely no way to verify a contested election.

"The spreads were big enough in Pennsylvania's elections this year that there was not a problem," he said. "But it has already turned into a disaster for other states."

Brownlee said he wants Centre County to convert to optical scan machines, existing technology that requires voters to mark a paper ballot and feed it into an electronic scanner.

Joyce McKinley, Centre County's director of elections, would not comment about the machines. The cost of the county's new voting machines has not been released.

Penn State Information Sciences and Technology professor John Carroll said the county needs to design a more robust voting system.

"We do not design any other computer system thinking there will never be a fault," he said.

Centre County representative Scott Conklin's Chief of Staff Tor Michaels said Conklin cast the only vote against touchscreen machines when the commission was deciding which machines to employ.

"We support the concept, the effort and the movement," Michaels said. "But we look at every bill as a starting point."