electionline Weekly

In Focus This Week

Senate Yields Bipartisan VVPAT Agreement (sort of): 2008 Is Too Soon
Feinstein says change would be ‘invitation to chaos’

By Kat Zambon
electionline.org

The possibility that voter-verifiable paper audit trails (VVPAT’s) could be a federal mandate by the 2008 presidential elections dimmed considerably when members of both parties in the Senate said last week any requirement earlier than 2010 would cause significant problems around the country.

Even Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate Rules Committee and sponsor of S. 1487, the “Ballot Integrity Act,” said the current timetable that requires retrofitting or purchasing new voting machines by 2008 would be an “invitation to chaos.”

Nearly all of the participants in the Rules Committee hearing held last week agreed – particularly state officials, who would be responsible for overhauling voting systems to make them compliant with the new federal law.

“The most important question is whether now is the time for Congress to be amending the Help America Vote Act of 2002, especially considering the fact that voting in the presidential primaries will begin in just six months,” said Vermont Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz.

1. 1487 was introduced by Feinstein May 24 and has 11 cosponsors, all Democrats, including all four Democratic senators currently seeking their party’s presidential nomination – Sen. Joe Biden, Del., Sen. Hillary Clinton, N.Y., Sen. Chris Dodd, Conn., and Sen. Barack Obama, Ill.

“Pushing the date back to the 2010 elections will give us more time to reach a bipartisan consensus with voting reform advocates and local and state officials to enact a new law that provides for increased accuracy and accountability at the polls without raising the specter of creating major new errors,” Feinstein said.

However, exactly how long it would take to implement the bill’s mandates – including retrofitting direct-recording electronics (DRE’s) with printers to produce VVPAT’s, mandatory manual audits, requirements for poll worker training, standardizing voter registration list purges and requiring equitable allocation of election resources for each voting site – remains in question, even with a 2010 deadline.

“We now see that the approach of the Help America Vote Act was sound; the timetables and funding levels proved to be unrealistic,” said Wendy Noren, clerk for Boone County, Mo., testifying on behalf of the National Association of Counties. “It is the clear intent of this legislation to ensure that appropriate research guides the development of a voting system with verifiable ballots that will meet the needs of the disabled community.”

However, Noren explained, the deadline for the research and guidelines for the development of the new equipment – January 1, 2010 – is the same as the date election officials are required to implement that equipment in the current version of the bill. “This almost surely guarantees that more federal money will be spent on equipment that is not manufactured or tested to those guidelines. In the words of Yogi Berra, this is deja vu all over again,” she said.

“We cannot afford to waste any more good will of the voters and scarce resources of federal, state and local governments by not getting the timetable sequence right this time,” she added.

The deadlines for implementation should be moved to 2014, according to Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center.

“We are now too far along in the year to be ordering changes for the 2008 election since it will likely result in election problems when we can least afford it – during the largest election we have every four years,” he said. “Congress must constantly be aware that there is a minimum six year lag time for extensive new requirements of voting systems.”

When developing a workable timeline, legislators need to remember that new product development takes 54 months and major hardware changes take 42 months, ranking member Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah said. To those testifying, he summarized, “You think we’re on the right track but you don’t think we’re there yet.”

Not everyone at the hearing agreed on the need to postpone the bill’s deadlines.

“While we always look forward to improvements in all bills as they move through the legislative process, we strongly support the need for voter verification and auditability in time for the 2008 presidential election,” Tanya Clay House, People for the American Way public policy director said.

In addition to its timing, there were other concerns regarding the bill’s voter verifiability requirement. Though the bill seeks to allow for voter verifiability, Dr. Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University said that the bill “does not come close to providing it,” as a paper trail doesn’t show that a vote will actually be counted. “That is not voter verification, regardless how it may be denominated in the text of the bill,” he said.

Shamos also asserted that reliability is the problem with DRE’s and that adding printers to existing DRE’s will only render them less reliable. “Indeed, machines with paper printers fail at nearly double the rate of machines without them, with one in five becoming inoperative on Election Day.”

George Gilbert, director for the board of elections in Guilford Co, N.C., explained that the issue of printer reliability is addressed in North Carolina state law, which requires that the paper trail is considered the ballot of record “except where paper ballots or records have been lost or destroyed or where there is another reasonable basis to conclude that the hand-to-eye count is not the true count.”

On the manual count requirements in S. 1487, Gilbert pointed out that “the inability to manually recount the paper records in Florida in 2000 and Washington State in 2004” led to the massive changes in election reform currently underway. Gilbert also said that research shows that audits are more accurate when they are automated and that paper is just one way to verify a ballot.

1. 1487 “is aimed at the right target but it needs to be loaded with the right ammunition,” Gilbert said.

Feinstein plans hearing on system security following California’s review

On July 31, Feinstein announced that the committee will hold a September hearing to consider a new report from California following their top-to-bottom review of voting machines and systems. As part of the review, University of California computer scientists successfully hacked into voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems.

“This report demonstrates the precarious risk of relying on electronic voting machines, especially when a verified paper record is not provided,” she said in a press release. “These findings are yet another reason that states and counties should consider a move to optical scan machines that provide an auditable, individual voter-verified paper record without having to rely on a separate printer.”

The top-to-bottom review included tests for accessibility and a subsequent report concluded that none of the three systems “met the accessibility requirements of current law and none performed satisfactorily in test voting by persons with a range of disabilities and alternate language needs.” California Secretary of State Debra Bowen will issue certification decisions for the three voting systems by August 3.