[EM] Forwarded from Steven Hill, his WA Post oped: "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"

[Chris Benham]

*Will Your Vote Count in 2006?*

/By Steven Hill/

Special to washingtonpost.com's Think Tank Town
Tuesday, August 1, 2006; 11:56 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080100561.html

 

Watching Mexico live through a controversial presidential election was 
like holding up a mirror to our own election difficulties in recent 
years. As we round the corner and head toward the upcoming November 
elections -- with control of the Congress up for grabs -- what can 
Americans expect? Will our votes count? There is both cause for worry, 
as well as signs that effective voting reform advocacy is paying off.

The root cause of our troubled elections is that, unbelievably, the U.S. 
provides less security, testing, and oversight of our nation's voting 
equipment and election administration than it does to slot machines and 
the gaming industry. Our elections are administered by a hodgepodge of 
over 3000 counties scattered across the country with minimal national 
standards or uniformity. Widely differing practices on the testing and 
certification of voting equipment, the handling of provisional and 
absentee ballots, protocols for recounts, and training of election 
officials and poll workers makes for a bewildering terrain.

 

	

*About Think Tank Town*

Washingtonpost.com edits and publishes columns submitted by 10 prominent 
think tanks on a rotating basis every other weekday. Each think tank is 
free to choose its authors and the topics it believes are most important 
and timely. Here are the participating organizations:   

·                                 *_American Enterprise Institute_* 
<http://www.aei.org/>  

·                                 *_Brookings Institution_* 
<http://www.brookings.edu/>  

·                                 *_Cato Institute_* 
<http://www.cato.org/>  

·                                 *_Center for American Progress_* 
<http://www.americanprogress.org/>  

·                                 *_Center for Strategic and 
International Studies_* <http://www.csis.org/>  

·                                 *_Council on Foreign Relations_* 
<http://www.cfr.org/index.html>  

·                                 *_Heritage Foundation_* 
<http://www.heritage.org/>  

·                                 *_New America Foundation_* 
<http://www.newamerica.net/>  

·                                 *_RAND Corporation_* 
<http://www.rand.org/>  

·                                 *_Urban Insitute_* 
<http://www.urban.org/>  


The three federal laboratories testing voting equipment and software 
operate with little government oversight. They are called "independent 
testing authorities," even though two of them have donated tens of 
thousands of dollars to GOP candidates and the Republican National 
Committee. The shoddy testing and certification procedures are greased 
by a revolving door between government regulators and the industry. 
Former secretaries of state from California, Florida and Georgia, once 
their state's chief regulator, became paid lobbyists for the corporate 
vendors after stepping down from public office, as did a former governor 
of New Hampshire. Several secretaries of state in 2004 served as 
co-chairs of the George W. Bush re-election campaign for their state; 
one of these oversaw the election in which he ran -- successfully -- for 
governor.

Conflicts of interest have crept like a weed into nearly every crevice 
of election administration. Making matters worse, the powers-that-be 
appear uncertain about what a secure election administration system 
actually looks like. This was painfully obvious at the Voting Systems 
Testing Summit in November 2005, which marked the first time that top 
federal regulators, vendors, testing laboratories, election 
administrators, computer scientists and fair elections advocates came 
together in one place. No one could articulate a comprehensive inventory 
of the many problems in securing the vote, much less the solutions. 
Instead, there was a lot of finger-pointing and excuses.

Clearly, the biggest threat to the integrity of our elections is not the 
shortcomings of any particular type of computerized voting equipment but 
the fact that -- like the failed rescue effort following Hurricane 
Katrina -- no one seems to be steering the ship. There is no central 
brain or team that has a handle on all aspects of the process, 
developing best practices or a roadmap that states and counties can 
follow. Tragically, while Congress has appropriated $3 billion for 
buying new voting equipment, the money is arriving before there are 
necessary standards in place to ensure the money is not wasted.

Yet these legitimate concerns also must be kept in perspective, lest we 
spiral into a paralyzing paranoia. There are a number of positives. 
Election security activists are more mobilized than ever and they are 
having an impact. They have raised the profile of these issues to the 
point of national urgency. Their efforts, once considered the actions of 
fanatical gadflies, are being increasingly cited by respected election 
bureaucrats. Former President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State James 
A. Baker III were co-chairs of a 2005 bipartisan commission which warned 
that "software can be modified maliciously before being installed into 
individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the 
election industry any more than in other industries."

Reform advocates' increased credibility has resulted in real action, 
with several governors and secretaries of state taking matters into 
their own hands. Some states are now requiring a "voter verified paper 
audit trail" (VVPAT). Election security advocates have also begun filing 
lawsuits as a way to block state and election officials' efforts to use 
touch-screen equipment that lack a VVPAT. So far, lawsuits in nearly a 
dozen states have been filed, with the embattled terrain becoming tense 
and increasingly high-stakes.

Another positive development is the use in half of all counties of 
optical-scan machines that read hand-marked paper ballots (up from 41 
percent in 2000), since at least the paper ballot can be used as an 
audit trail. And the use of punchcard voting equipment, which was badly 
discredited during the 2000 presidential vote count in Florida, has 
declined from 18 percent of counties in 2000 to just under 4 percent today.

Heading into the 2006 election, fair election advocates need to remain 
vigilant. Almost bizarrely, vigilance will be aided by the 
noncompetitive nature of our winner-take-all elections. In the contest 
over control of Congress, the battleground has become extremely shrunken 
with only 30-35 out of 435 U.S. House seats and perhaps six to eight 
races in the Senate up for grabs. That means efforts to monitor 
elections can occur over a smaller playing field, allowing targeted 
vigilance.

In the longer term, activists must turn their efforts to a more 
visionary agenda that will ensure fair and secure elections. That agenda 
must include: 1) elections run by nonpartisan and unbiased election 
officials; 2) professionalization and training of election officials and 
poll workers, and 3) a national elections commission that can partner 
with states and counties to create national, uniform standards for 
running elections. Looking even further, the U.S. should consider 
following the lead of other nations and create "public interest voting 
equipment," where government contracts with the sharpest minds in the 
private sector to develop open source software and voting equipment that 
is owned and managed by the government instead of by shadowy corporations.

The current state of election administration is very much like the 
repeated warnings in New Orleans about the vulnerability of its levees. 
Without modernization of our administrative practices, as well as better 
public oversight and vigilance, our elections will remain vulnerable to 
breakdown and allegations of fraud.

*/Steven Hill/*/ is director of the political reform program of the New 
America Foundation and author of "10 Steps to Repair American Democracy" 
(/10steps.net <http://p3books.com/books/10_steps.html>/)./

 

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