In Focus This Week
Holt Bill Clears Committee as Republican Amendments Shot Down
Few changes but much controversy over reform legislation
By Kat Zambon
electionline.org
Arguing that they were acting on behalf of state and local elections officials concerned about the implications of election reform legislation, Republicans in the Committee on House Administration were nonetheless thwarted this week in their attempts to amend the bill by Democrats who say the bill is necessary to safeguard the 2008 vote.
In his opening statement, Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., ranking member on the committee, reiterated his concerns about H.R. 811, the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.”
“Unfortunately, the additional time for review has not changed my perception of this bill,” he said. “As we all saw in the 2000 elections, in the days of hanging and pregnant chad, paper is far from fool-proof.”
Ehlers displayed a stack of letters he received from elections officials from across the country opposing the bill.
“These are the people who are most familiar with our elections systems, telling us that they simply cannot effectively administer the 2008 election if Congress ignores their pleas and forces this legislation upon them,” he said.
GOP lawmakers on the committee introduced a dozen amendments, with issues directly relevant to the bill, including altering the legislation’s source code disclosure requirements, its timetable for meeting federal mandates for voter-verified paper audit trails, what would constitute the ballot recording in a recount, cost issues and the future of thermal paper printing currently in use in a number of states.
Other amendments reflected the party’s legislative priorities in election reform, including two introduced by Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., that would have required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The subject is not addressed in the original bill nor a substitute offered by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., who also chairs the subcommittee on elections.
Democrats, however, said they had the voters on their side.
Lofgren’s staff countered Ehlers’ stack of letters with boxes of petitions signed by citizens in favor of the bill.
“We have heard the concerns of state and local elections officials and we have tried to address them in the substitute bill,” Lofgren said. “We believe this substitute deals with all of the issues that can be dealt with.”
Lofgren’s substitute would increase the authorization for replacing touch-screen voting machines to $1 billion from the $300 million offered originally in H.R. 811. It would allow states to use the audit standards issued in H.R. 811 or develop another audit system with approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST would be required to establish guidelines and a process for states to receive approval by May 1.
While thermal paper doesn’t fall under the definition of “durable paper,” which the substitute described as capable of withstanding hand counts and recounts and able to be preserved for 22 months, Lofgren’s substitute would allow states that currently use electronic voting machines with thermal paper to receive a waiver, allowing them to keep using their voting technology until 2010.
Under Lofgren’s substitute, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) would be responsible for notifying Congress, states and the public when a voting machine testing laboratory’s accreditation is revoked, terminated, suspended or restored and when there is “credible evidence of significant security failure at an accredited laboratory.” EAC would also be required to set up an escrow account through which vendors will pay testing labs.
Ehlers offered a substitute that would delay implementation until 2010 and give states the authority to determine their own audit procedures. States say the process in the bill is worse than nothing because it interferes with the recount process, according to Ehlers, and the National Association of Counties (NACo) supported Ehlers’ substitute. It’s impossible to measure the successes of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) until states have finished implementing it, Ehlers said, and H.R. 811 undermines HAVA’s gains. Ehlers’ substitute failed.
After Ehlers’ bill was voted down, Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., introduced an amendment that would give voters the ability to choose between casting a paper ballot at the polls or at an electronic voting machine. The amendment also would require polling places to carry enough paper ballots for each voter and display a sign reminding voters to verify their ballots. Capuano’s amendment passed.
After Capuano’s amendment was introduced and approved, the mark-up fell into a routine whereby a minority member of the committee would propose an amendment, a majority committee member, usually Lofgren, would explain their opposition to the amendment, then the amendment would be defeated in a vote.
At the close of the hearing, Ehlers stated, “I just register my dismay that the bill is passing in this form.” Lofgren’s substitute passed.
Citing the 18,000 lost votes in Sarasota, Fla. during the 2006 general election, Ralph Neas, People for the American Way (PFAW) president urged Congress to consider the new H.R. 811 in a timely fashion. “If voting machines are a sickness, the Holt bill is good medicine. We must make every effort possible to ensure that an injustice like Sarasota never happens again,” he said in a press release.
However, PFAW’s assertion that a voter-verifiable paper audit trail would have prevented the election meltdown and ensuing confusion in Sarasota is “despicable,” according to Brad Friedman.
“Neas well knows – because we personally discussed it at length with him … that ‘paper trails’ on the paperless touch-screen voting machines used in the FL-13 election would likely have made no difference whatsoever in the outcome of that election,” Friedman wrote. “Apparently a paper ballot – one that is actually counted – for every vote cast in America is of little interest to either the Democratic or Republican members of the committee.”
When asked if the Holt bill that was approved in committee was an improvement, Alysoun McLaughlin, associate legislative director for NaCO said, “Not even close … there’s still no DRE on the market” that meets H.R. 811’s requirements.
McLaughlin pointed out that H.R. 811 would force states to conduct audits by hand and ban the use of handheld scanners to tally ballots for the official count. “Fundamentally there are some bottom line assumptions in this bill that cannot go. The notion that electronic scanners should never be used in conducting a recount … is impossibly cumbersome,” she said.
“What I keep hearing is that people are going to quit their jobs if this becomes law,” he said. “It can’t be implemented – hand recounts statewide? You just can’t do that.”
In Focus This Week
Statewide Voter Lists Are Still Works in Progress
States have faced lawsuits, technical challenges
By Sean Greene
electionline.org
The creation of statewide voter registration databases, one of the most costly and complex requirements of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), has caused delays and technical problems in several states, leading to questions about the effectiveness of the systems as well as federal lawsuits.
electionline.org profiles four states that have faced some of those challenges: Alabama and New Jersey, which have been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for missing the January 1, 2006 HAVA database deadline; and Texas and Wisconsin, which have experienced problems during system implementation.
Alabama
Alabama’s path to completing its voter registration list has been long and at times contentious. In 2005, state attempts to find a company to build a new database failed. By May 2006, DOJ sued then-Secretary of State Nancy Worley (D) for missing the deadline. The suit led to a court-ordered appointment of a special master to implement the system, Gov. Bob Riley (R).
Some Democrats saw the move as politically charged.
“It is impossible to ignore the partisan colorations of the court’s intervention….It is also striking that in no instance has the Department of Justice under the Bush Administration ever sought such an aggressive intervention in a state’s election process,” said Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., in a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last August. (Davis recently became a member of the Committee on House Administration which handles oversight of federal elections, filling the vacancy left by the death of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald.)
The Department of Justice defended its actions.
“This administration also has filed voting lawsuits against state officials of both parties in Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas. Facts, not party affiliations, drive our litigation decisions,” responded Wan J. Kim, assistant attorney general for the civil rights division.
Politics aside, efforts to meet the court-mandated August 31 deadline have forged ahead. In September 2006 Riley appointed a committee to oversee the creation of the system and in March 2007 he announced that Omaha-based Election Systems & Software (ES&S) had been selected as the vendor, stating Alabama was “on track to meet this important deadline.“
New Jersey
New Jersey was also sued by DOJ and entered into an agreement last October because of troubles with its registration system that arose during its debut a year ago. The agreement mandates full HAVA compliance by the end of this month.
“The statewide voter registration system was deployed [in May] but significant problems were uncovered in testing and programming the system…Problems remaining include data conversion problems, the accurate issuance of absentee ballots, and the inability to verify a registrant’s identity,” according to an October 2006 press release from the state’s attorney general.
While the state did not respond to requests for comment, difficulties are being addressed, reported Portland, Ore.-based Saber Corporation, the vendor creating the list. The company also has election management systems in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Idaho, Oregon, Maryland, Iowa, Missouri and Montana and has systems in development in Colorado and Wyoming.
“The May 30 deadline will be met from our perspective,” said Todd Weinberg, Saber’s New Jersey portfolio manager.
Texas
The state’s registration system (TEAM), built by IBM and Austin, Tex.-based Hart InterCivic, experienced some problems during the just-completed early voting period for Saturday’s constitutional amendment election. In all, 224 of the state’s 254 counties currently use the system.
Ann McGeehan, the state’s election director, acknowledged the system had hit some rough spots but added changes have been made and the issues are being worked out.
“The implementation of TEAM was not as smooth as we had hoped. Response time was exceedingly slow at times, and this meant that some counties had to work outside regular business hours to get their work done. However, we have made several changes and response time has greatly improved,” she stated.
In addition to slow response times, some county officials reported that they did not receive up-to-date voter lists until the first day of early voting.
The vendors made changes, McGeehan said, and the process of generating lists for Election Day is working well and with no backlog.
While news reports have indicated some county election officials were disheartened by these problems, McGeehan is still hopeful the system will be a success.
“We continue to be optimistic that, in the long run, the state will provide a system that will result in greater functionality and a more accurate list. “
Wisconsin
Wisconsin, which signed a contract with the Bermuda-based Accenture to build its registration system in November 2004, has faced ongoing criticism from local officials and state lawmakers. (Accenture had database contracts terminated or ended by mutual agreement in three other states – Colorado, Kansas and Wyoming.)
In March, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that some Wisconsin election officials complained that the system is much slower than local systems they worked with previously and that it was too complex and error-prone.
Kevin Kennedy, executive director of the State Elections Board (SEB), agreed some challenges remain but also noted how far the state has come.
“There are functionality and performance issues that must be addressed under the requirements of the state’s contract with Accenture. [However}, in implementing a statewide voter registration system, Wisconsin’s county and municipal election officials, along with SEB staff, have overcome some monumental challenges not faced by other states,” Kennedy said.
He pointed out that prior to 2006, 1,539 municipalities with a population of less than 5,000 were not required to register voters and that more than 325 municipalities that did have voter lists had them in variety of formats. This left the state essentially starting from scratch as well as collecting registration data for the first time from more than one million residents in the smaller municipalities.
And while the system is not yet fully HAVA-compliant, the state has stayed in close contact with DOJ about its compliance efforts.
Kennedy also described recent progress, including work with Accenture to improve the system’s efficiency, work with local election officials to improve the accuracy of voter matching functions and a partnership with the University of Wisconsin to create a web-based training program for clerks and staff involving specific aspects of the system.
This and the successful use of parts of the system in three previous statewide elections have led him to view the statewide voter registration system as an integral component of well-run elections.
“The statewide registration system is helpful in performing some key essential tasks required to manage an election in which the public can have confidence, including capturing voter information, printing poll books, and recording voter participation.”
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NOTE: The Pew Center on the States (PCS) has released answers to frequently asked questions about the recent Pew/JEHT $2 million Request for Proposals. More details about the RFP are available at the PCS web page. Responses are due Monday, June 4.
Election Reform News This Week
- Elections were held in several states this week to varying degrees of success. In Marion County, Ind., five of the county’s precincts never opened while 45 opened late. The Indianapolis Star described the vote as “perhaps the most chaotic, confused and bumbling election in Marion County’s history.”
- In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Election Day reportedly went smoothly, with few, if any problems reported in the county’s 164 precincts. According to the Columbus Dispatch, there were two “glitches” with electronic memory cards—one was missing, but found left in a machine and the other was corrupted, but with no votes lost. “This is about as close to flawless as we could get,” Elections Board spokesman Alan Melamed told the paper.
- The election board in St. Louis, Mo. raised some eyebrows recently when it allowed two churches to use city voting machines to conduct elections for new pastors. As part of a community outreach program, the Election Board has held electronic voting machines demonstrations for many community groups, but there have only been two cases when the machines have been used in non-municipal, but real elections. Despite the educational aspect, church-state separation advocates told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that they have never heard of another local government lending its voting technology to places of worship. “Internal church business is absolutely, positively no business of the St. Louis Board of Elections,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. But the city Board insists it’s a good program. “A lot of people, especially seniors, are afraid to use them on Election Day and choose not to,” board member Mary Wheeler Jones told the paper. “But take (the machines) to their church where there’s no other way for them to vote, and you get 93-year-olds using them.”
- They’ve rolled die, they’ve drawn cards and now they are relying on bingo balls to decide tied elections. With two candidates in the race for Crete Village (Ill.) Board tied with 553 votes each, including absentee ballots, Will County Clerk Nancy Schultz Voots used two bingo balls in a glass container to determine the final outcome. According the Northwest Indiana Times, Illinois county clerks can use whatever method they like to break a tie. Will County also uses the bingo ball lottery to determine the position of names on ballots. This was Will County’s first tie since 2002.
Opinions This Week
National: Voting machines, Primary elections
Colorado: Partisan election offices
Florida: Paper trails, Primaries, Voting machines
Indiana: Modernization
Maryland: Voter registration
New York: Voting machines, II
Ohio: Cuyahoga County
South Carolina: Voter registration
Texas: Felon voting rights, Voter ID, II
Some sites require registration
Job Postings This Week
All job listings must be received by 12 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday for publication in our Thursday newsletter. Job listings are free but may be edited for length. Whenever possible, include Internet information. Please email job postings to mmoretti@electionline.org
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