[EM] The House Administration Committee Sends Voter Confidence Bill to House Floor

Thu May 10 20:20:14 PDT 2007

The House Administration Committee Sends Voter Confidence Bill to House Floor

[My comments in brackets [ ]'s].

The new Holt bill with markup as of May 8 is posted on the National
Association of Secretaries of State web site:

http://www.nass.org/Hill%20Documents/HR%20811%20ZL%20Substitute%20as%20reported%205_8_07.pdf

The House Admin Committee Announcement:

http://cha.house.gov/

Truthout's Matt Renner wrote a critique of the new bill pointing out
that, under the bill, states could choose to replace existing digital
recording electronic DRE machines with newer DRE machines which do not
fully solve the problems.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051007A.shtml

[Hopefully states will responsibly replace existing DREs with
economical, auditable voter-marked optical scan paper ballot systems -
and ballot assist or ballot marking devices for voters with
disabilities and voters with foreign language needs.]

Here are the principal changes between the earlier introduced bill and
what was reported out of committee [written by someone else & I have
not checked every statement]:

* Effective Date for New Requirements – January 2008 deadline has been
replaced with bifurcated deadline:

•    All jurisdictions that used any paper-ballot-based voting system
at all in 2006 (including thermal reel-to-reel systems and accessible
systems that used a paper ballot in any manner) have until the first
election in 2010 to meet new requirements;

•    All jurisdictions that had no voter verified paper ballots at all
in 2006 have until November 2008 to meet all of the requirements (and
they are not entitled to a waiver)

* Funding for Voting System Requirements – has been increased from
$300 million to $1 billion.

* Ban on Internet connections – has been expanded to include, in
addition to devices upon which votes are cast, devices upon which
votes are tabulated and ballots are programmed.

* Software disclosure – the requirement that software be disclosed to
any person has been replaced by a requirement that election-dedicated
software be released to qualified persons who sign non-disclosure
agreements protecting intellectual property rights and trade secrets.

* Extension of Authorization of EAC – has been removed

* Military and overseas voting – overseas ballots are included in
audits, but the requirement that the DOD and EAC develop protocols for
treatment of paper ballots has been removed.

* Vote of Record language – now provides that even if paper ballots
have been demonstrated to have been compromised in numbers exceeding
the margin of victory, "the electronic tally shall not be used as the
exclusive basis for determining the official certified vote tally."

* Audit Board -- The Audit Board has been removed, but it has been
replaced with a requirement that the entity chosen by the State to
conduct the audits satisfy the requirements of "independence" set
forth in the GAO's "Government Accounting Standards."

* How many Federal Elections will be audited – Unopposed elections and
elections determined by more than an 80% margin of victory are not
required to be audited.

* Audit procedures and ballot custody – Audits must be conducted in
the place where the ballots are stored and counted after the election,
and in the presence of the ballot custodians.

* Funding for audits – an explicit authorization of $100 million
annually has been added.

* Recounts that occur prior to certification (and might overlap with
an audit) – Section 327 requires that any pre-certification recount
done instead of an audit be done by hand count of the paper ballots,
and it has been expanded to provide that if the recount is not a 100%
count, that at least as many ballots be counted, the selection of
those ballots be just as random, the recount be just as publicly
observable, and the results be published, all as is required of
audits.

--------

[My comments and recommendations follow]

In sum, compromises were made to the original HR811 to please voting
vendors, election officials, and election activists - so this result
might be the best bill that could possibly be implemented in time to
achieve auditable voting systems and manual audits by the November
2008 election. I was very disappointed to notice that the bill still
requires audit amounts of 10%, 5%, and 3% which will only detect one
or more corrupt precincts whenever sufficient votes are miscounted to
alter election outcomes with only a one in ten chance in some cases,
and yet are more administratively burdensome than 99% success rate
audits; but at least NIST is given the option of determining other
permissable audit procedures.

The major problems that are not addressed by HR811 and its companion
Senate bill S559 are:

1.  the need for timely public access to election records and data
that is necessary for the public to be able to verify the integrity of
the electoral process and the manual audits, and to be able to measure
voter service and voter disenfranchisement levels; and

2. the need for public release, scrutiny, and improvement to voted
ballot handling security procedures.  Keeping such procedures secret,
gives the opportunity for ballot substitution or ballot tampering to
match possible erroneous electronic counts prior to audits.

Without full citizen oversight over elections, the integrity of
election outcomes cannot be fully secured.

Regardless of its shortcomings, I recommend supporting this version of
HR811 and urging your US Senators to support S559, the Senate version,
because it  would force all states using DREs with thermal paper rolls
which violate voter anonymity and do not use durable paper ballot
records - to replace their voting systems by 2010; and would implement
 independent election audits of federal elections for the first time
in the United States.

The Senate version  is S559 by Bill Nelson D-FL.

http://senate.gov

Please email/write your US Senators and ask them to support S559, but
to amend its audit amount with the following language:

------------

(a) In General- Except as provided in subsection (b), the number of
voter-verified paper ballots which will be subject to a hand count
administered by the Election Audit Board of a State under this
subtitle with respect to an election shall be determined as follows:

(1) at least 1% (one per centum) of each county's precinct or batch
vote counts shall be  hand counted; and

(2) a sufficient number of precinct or batch vote counts shall be
manually counted to  give at least a 99% probability for detecting at
least one corrupt/miscounted precinct or  batch vote count if the
amount of corrupt vote counts were sufficient to alter the  election
outcome of any federal election contest, taking into account the
margin  between the candidates and the total number of precinct or
batch vote counts in the  Congressional district involved (in the case
of an election for the House of  Representatives) or the State (in the
case of any other election for Federal office), and  assuming that at
most x% of any precinct or batch vote count is erroneously counted,
where x is set by the US Election Audit and Recount Committeev; and

(3) at least one vote count is audited in each election contest
submitted to the voters  within each county's jurisdiction; and

(4) in addition to randomly selected precincts in (1), (2), and (3)
above, a small number  of discretionary precinct vote counts selected
by candidates, or alternatively, precinct  vote counts which
calculations show are "suspicious" should be manually audited.

(b) Use of Alternative Mechanism- Notwithstanding subsection (a), a
State may adopt and  apply an alternative mechanism to determine the
number of voter-verified paper ballots which  will be subject to the
hand counts required under this subtitle with respect to an election,
so  long as the National Institute of Standards and Technology
determines that the alternative  mechanism will be at least as
effective in ensuring the accuracy of the election results and as
transparent as the procedure under subsection (a).

------------

Further information on why the existing Holt audit amounts are
ineffective and administratively burdensome are provided here:

Federal Election Audit Costs
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/FederalAuditCosts.pdf
Evaluates the cost and effectiveness of three audit proposals using
federal election results from 2002 and 2004 US House and Senate
elections

Fool Me Once: Checking Vote Count Integrity
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/TierElectionAuditEval.pdf

-- 
Kathy Dopp

The material expressed herein is the informed  product of the author
Kathy Dopp's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a
Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in
exit poll discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at

P.O. Box 680192
Park City, UT 84068
phone 435-658-4657

http://utahcountvotes.org
http://kathydopp.com
http://electionmathematics.org
http://electionarchive.org

Election Audit Mathematics Bibliography
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/KathyDoppAuditMathBibliography.pdf