Common Cause Blog

Holt Bill Passes Committee!

Here's an update from Susannah Goodman, who spent the afternoon in the committee room:

Hooray!� I just came back from the House Longworth building where the House Administration Committee passed an amended version of HR 811, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 out of the Committee by vote of 6 to 3.

A HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who have supported this effort with your calls, letters, articles, editorials, thoughts and words and financial support.� THIS IS YOUR VICTORY.� There is no way we could have gotten this far without you!

Although we still have a long way to go - the bill still needs to pass the House Floor and then needs to go through the whole process in the Senate - this is a great start.� This is a great day for verifiable elections.

Roll Call today: "If Nov. 7 is a mess, Congress will be to blame"

You may not read Roll Call ("The newspaper of Capitol Hill") every day, but there are people who do: members of Congress and their staff. Today's Roll Call includes two excellent opinion pieces, one an editorial and the other an OpEd by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Here's what Ornstein says about Congress and elections:

At the same time, the level of confidence in the election system is low, partisan tension is high, and Congress has been absent without leave as this problem looms. Brace yourselves: Troubled as its election was, we could end up looking with envy at Mexico.

And here's a juicy quote from today's Roll Call editorial:

Six years after the "hanging chad" presidential election debacle in Florida and four years after Congress passed legislation designed to prevent such disasters from happening again, alarms are once again being raised that these pivotal Congressional elections could be beset by chaos at the polls...

...Ever since 2003, Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) has offered legislation to require that electronic machines be equipped with a backup paper trail to make it possible to resolve disputes. His bill, now boasting 212 co-sponsors, will not receive its first hearing in the House Administration Committee until Sept. 28 -- just days before Congress is ready to adjourn and 38 days before the elections. There's no way around it: If Nov. 7 is a mess, Congress will be to blame.

For the entire text of the editorial, click here. For Ornstein's OpEd, click here. (Access to Roll Call requires login.)

Voting machine update

I wanted to give folks an update on our voting machine integrity campaign. Because of the work of so many activists on this issue, we are seeing a much better situation in this election cycle. We still have a long way to go and work to do, but many more voters in 2006 will be able to verify that their vote was recorded correctly.

According to VerifiedVoting.org and the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, in 2004 only 10 states had passed requirements that voting systems produce voter verifiable paper records - covering only 27% of registered voters. Today, 27 states have passed requirements that their voting systems produce voter verifiable paper records, covering almost 55% of registered voters. In addition, eight states and a number of counties have simply done the right thing and purchased voting systems which automatically produce paper records, bringing the total to over 65%.

Together we can reach our goal to have all voting machines produce paper records and have every state mandate an audit of those records.

Legal challenges for e-voting

Several states that are trying to introduce electronic voting machines to their electoral process are being challenged in the courts.

Per USA Today:

Voter Action, a non-partisan advocacy group, led the challenge filed Thursday against the state of Colorado and nine counties, as well as similar lawsuits in California and Arizona this spring and New Mexico last year. Court actions by others targeted the devices in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Most of the suits argue that the machines are vulnerable to software tampering, don't keep an easily recountable printed record and may miscount, switch or not record votes and even add phantom votes.

We've already seen difficulties with state primaries held in March in Texas and Illinois, and more and more counties are discounting the use of electronic ballots as unreliable and unsafe.

What's it going to take for officials everywhere to realize that a voter-verifiable paper ballot is the only good solution?

Black Voters in New Orleans

Kirk Clay, who works with us on voting rights issues, passed along this excellent piece on voting in New Orleans. It's written by Lance Hill, an historian and author of "Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement", University of North Carolina Press and the executive director of the non-profit Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University:

Guest Commentary
By Lance Hill
April 18, 2006
Feel free to reproduce
I am surprised at how many people responding to my column earlier this week thought the early voter system for the New Orleans Mayor's election was successful in helping displaced black voters. They were amazed to hear that only 4% of the black registered voters made it to the eleven polls set up around the state to accommodate voters still in exile. I understand their surprise. The main story on the vote outcome was in the New Orleans Times-Picayune's story on April 16 which reported the total number of votes cast in early voting but not in comparison to the total number of registered voters, especially those displaced. What was reported under the subheading "Large Black Turnout," was Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater's estimate that 70% of the 10,585 people who cast ballots were black, which translates into 7,409 black votes. That sounds like a lot of votes unless you include what the Times-Picayune omitted: that these were 7,409 voters of out a total of 188,166 eligible black registered voters. Put in this context, the real story was that 96% of the eligible black voters did not show up to the satellite polls and will have to vote absentee or in person. ... read more

Paper Is the Only Transparent Option

Last week, as a large crowd of dedicated activists converged on Capitol Hill to lobby House Members to support H.R. 550, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a confusing message was heard from one of the pioneers in the fight against unverifiable voting systems.

Bev Harris of Black Box Voting published an article claiming that HR 550 would do more harm than good, and that those dedicated activists who paid their own way to Washington to lobby members of Congress were "insiders" who, according to Harris, are prone to all sorts of nefarious behavior.

Not surprisingly, foes of verifiable elections, or perhaps I should say, proponents of DREs, have joined Harris's cry. One notable example is Dan Tokaji of Ohio State, who trumpeted Harris's article in his blog yesterday.

Harris and Tokaji (and probably anyone else who wants to see fair, accurate, and accountable elections) have one thing right: the most important ingredient for election reform is transparency. However, as I see it, voter verified paper ballots are the only way to create transparency at this point in time.

A black box of any kind by definition is not transparent. Therefore, a DRE that produces no independent record checked by the voter is totally opaque. Will paper solve all the ills around our voting systems? Of course not. But how can we audit machines if we have nothing to compare the machine-produced totals against?

One summer during college, I worked in the bookkeeping department of The Big Banana in Gilford, New Hampshire. I did a lot of auditing of vendors' bills, and I always had receipts to check against the invoices. The rule was, no receipts, no payment. There's a reason for that; it's called verifiability.

And Tokaji's complaints about the quality of the technology producing the paper ballots are specious. We proponents of the voter verified paper ballot in no way suggest that curly, flimsy, thermal paper is the way to go. (In fact, many of us prefer optical scan machines, which use paper ballots filled out by the voter.) But we are at the mercy of the machine vendors, who never cease to surprise us with their ineptitude.

Harris is just plain wrong that we activists (including those from Common Cause) are not lobbying against secrecy. And Tokaji, who was active in Common Cause for many years, most recently as a member of our National Governing Board, shouldn't have let her get away with that one. He knows that openness and transparency are two of our main goals; we've fought for them for 35 years.

In the end, I think that Harris and the supporters of H.R. 550 have more in common than she admits. And we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Harris for her ground-breaking investigations. But in this case, I can't figure out her point. if HR 550 does not pass -- as she and Tokaji seem to be urging -- then there will be no mandatory requirement for voter verified paper records in 24 states, and no mandatory requirement for independent audits in 38 states (according to electionline.org, only 12 states have audit provisions ). Why would Bev Harris choose to have 12 states with partial independent auditing over a bill that would require all 50 states to have partial independent auditing?

Making good progress toward fixing election problems is not the same as using a too-weak antibiotic, as Harris claims. After all, elections aren't infections. They're merely the foundation of our democracy.

P.S. You can see Representative Rush Holt's rebuttal here.

Let's Get It Straight by 2008!

Yesterday afternoon, MoveOn sent out an email to its members, extolling the success of last week's Lobby Days and inviting members to contribute a small amount to Common Cause to support our campaign to pass a federal bill that would require voter verified paper ballots, random audits, accessible voting machines, and publicly disclosed voting machine software. (As you know, we use Representative Rush Holt's excellent bill, HR 550, as the model for this federal legislation.)

We are very pleased to accept MoveOn's support of our work. The plan to pass legislation is comprehensive and will require both money and the energy of dedicated activists around the country.

While MoveOn cited Common Cause in this effort, the work completed to-date on the campaign to pass a federal bill modeled on HR 550 has been done by a broad coalition of nonpartisan groups. Lobby Days was put together by the ICount Coalition. VerifiedVoting, VoteTrustUSA, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Working Assets, and VotersUnite all brought members to Capitol Hill, as did Common Cause. We very much look forward to working with all these groups as the campaign goes forward; they are an integral part of the plan. Their experience, commitment, and expert technical knowledge are invaluable.

It's going to take all of us working together to achieve success. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of unlimited time. We truly have to "get it straight by 2008."