Are Voting Machine Purists Standing in the Way of Reform?

Are Internet election integrity activists going to derail an attempt in Congress to regulate some of the biggest problems with touch-screen electronic voting machines? Will they scare off federal legislators who are going out on a limb to make it very hard for local, county and state election officials to keep using these problem-plagued machines?

There's the old political expression: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But some election integrity activists are letting their vision of a perfectly justifiable solution -- purging all touch-screen voting machines -- get in the way of backing a very good election reform bill now moving through Congress that will bring significant oversight, transparency and accountability to electronic voting systems.

The bill, HR 811, "The Increased Accessibility and Voter Confidence Act," introduced by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., regulates electronic voting machines for the first time. After many well-publicized problems in recent congressional and presidential elections, from 18,000 missing congressional votes in Sarasota, Fla., to thousands of disenfranchised voters in Cleveland, the bill fills a gaping hole in federal election law: the current lack of any regulation on the newest generation of voting technologies.

The bill would require that all software used in the counting and recording of votes to be readily available to the public, which is not now the case. It would require all voting machines to produce or use a durable voter-verified paper record of all votes cast, which is not now the case. It would require mandatory audits of voter-verified paper ballots to check the accuracy of electronic tallies and deter fraud, which also is not law now. It would require that the audit process be open to the public, which has not happened in recent presidential and congressional elections.

The bill also seeks to prevent electronic hacking by prohibiting wireless communication devices on any voting system, which is now not the case. It would bar poll workers from taking the machines home with them, and create strict security requirements for software handling and documenting of the chain of custody for ballots and other election materials. This too is not law now. It would prevent voting machine makers from privately testing their machines -- and claiming they are accurate -- and require all industry tests, results and communications between vendors and testing labs be available for public review. And it would require emergency paper ballots to be provided to voters in the case of machine malfunctions.

But HR 811 doesn't ban the use of direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines -- and that is the problem for many election integrity activists.

Readers of liberal blogs and websites probably have seen postings, led by Brad Friedman of Brad Blog, that note that HR 811 will not eliminate the use of DRE machines. These are election systems where votes currently are recorded directly to computer memory with proprietary software and no independent means of auditing the election results. These systems also include precinct and countywide tabulators, which tally the vote totals and also contain proprietary software and preclude an independent audit. Apart from the better-known problems of these machines, such as votes not being recorded (Sarasota) and votes shifting to another candidate after a choice has been made (many jurisdictions), election integrity activists have been very frustrated by an inability to audit machines in counties where preelection polling and post-election hand-counts of paper ballots have found results that have varied by 10 percent or more from the "official" result tallied by these voting systems. That variance, seen in the 2004 presidential race in Ohio and in some recent congressional races, has fueled suspicions of electronic vote count fraud.