[Sosfbay-discuss] [Fwd: my WA Post oped: "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"]

[Gerry Gras]

FYI,

Gerry


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: my WA Post oped: "Will Your Vote Count in 2006?"
Date: Thu, 3 Aug 2006 14:29:10 -0700

From: Steven Hill, New America Foundation


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.



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"
( < http://p3books.com/books/10_steps.html > ).