False Choices in the Debate on Voting Technology

By Brad Friedman, AlterNet. Posted February 28, 2007.

American democracy cannot afford another questionable presidential election. Anybody disagree? The good news is that over the course of the last few years -- through the exhaustive and tireless work of an extraordinarily dedicated, rag-tag band of citizen patriots I call "The Election Integrity Movement" -- both the public and most of our politicians have finally come to understand that we have a serious problem with our electoral system.

The bad news is that, while they've finally discovered there's a problem -- unreliable, inaccurate, hackable voting machines, which count our public elections with secret software created by private companies -- the politicians, specifically the Democrats, and many of their public advocacy groups, have gotten the solution wrong. The answer is not "paper trails," that will never be counted, attached to touch-screen voting systems. The answer is paper ballots that are actually tabulated, either by optical-scan or hand-count. Seems simple enough, I know. But apparently not.

At The BRAD BLOG, we've been discussing the pros and cons of Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) new Election Reform bill HR 811 since it dropped about two weeks ago in the House. It has a lot of co-sponsors and traction, and there is much good in it. Some of its features include requirements for publicly-disclosed software, greatly increased restrictions on the use of the Internet and other networking, a ban on insane voting machine "sleepovers" at pollworkers' houses prior to elections, mandatory random audits of results, and a requirement for a "durable and archival paper ballot for every vote cast. Trouble is, Holt's bill never requires that the "durable and archival paper ballot" actually be tabulated. And that was no mistake.

I was allowed to give input to Holt's office with each draft of the new legislation -- an update, and a great improvement, to his Election Reform bill from the last session (HR 550) which, thanks to former-Rep. Bob Ney and the Republicans, never even made it to mark-up in committee. With each successive draft of the new bill, I suggested language that would require those "paper ballots" actually be tabulated, and each time, that language was not added.

Why? Because if such a requirement existed, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE/touch-screen) devices would effectively be banned forever from American elections in the bargain.

Sounds good to me. Given the number of legally-registered voters (thousands, if not millions) who were unable to even cast a vote due to DRE break-downs during the 2006 election cycle -- something that doesn't happen with a paper-based optical-scan or hand-counted system, which allows a voter to vote no matter what -- and the number of votes that were either flipped, recorded incorrectly or not at all by such touch-screen systems, it would seem to be a no-brainer that it's time to ban them all together.

Even the new Republican Governor of Florida now wants to replace his state's DRE machines with optical-scan systems. And, every computer scientist and computer expert I've ever spoken with agrees that op-scans are far safer for use in elections than DRE's.

Yet, Holt won't call for a ban on DREs in his legislation, and a number of the largest Democratic-based public-advocacy and civil rights groups don't want to ban them either. They are willing to support the dangerous Holt bill as is. So what the hell is going on here?

Here's what's going on: Supporters of the legislation are using three false dichotomies opportunistically and/or disingenuously and/or naively to help see it passed by Congress.

Democrats who support the bill, along with their closely-allied public advocacy groups -- such as Common Cause, PFAW, MoveOn, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, VoteTrustUSA, and the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition -- are currently unable or unwilling to show the necessary courage to insist upon the banning of disenfranchising, failed DRE/touch-screen voting system technology from all American elections.

And this is happening despite the fact that most of those groups actually agree --- and will admit privately, if not always publicly --- that DRE technology has no place in our electoral system.

Collectively, the following three arguments are being used to shore up support for a bill which offers much good, yet ultimately may prove to be as dangerous as the disastrous Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which set aside $3.8 billion federal tax dollars to "upgrade" America's electoral system with these god-forsaken machines.

See more stories tagged with: democracy, voting, electoral system, paper ballots, dre

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