At Least Six Good Reasons for Verifiable Voting

If a bill that is waylaid in congress is not passed to make it possible for states to verify the vote, about 30% of the nation's voters will use paperless electronic voting machines this November.

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Rep. Rush Holt today strongly criticized House members for blocking legislation – the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008 (H.R. 5036) – that would encourage states to conduct verifiable elections by converting to a paper ballot voting system, offering emergency paper ballots, and conducting hand-counted audits. Two weeks ago, the same legislation passed the House Administration Committee with bipartisan, unanimous support, including from some of those who voted to block the bill’s passage today.

H.R. 5036, as reported to the floor by the committee, would authorize funding to reimburse states with paperless jurisdictions that convert to paper-based voting systems in 2008 or provide emergency paper ballots that would be counted as regular ballots in the event of machine failure. The reimbursements would cover the cost of equipment conversion (from paperless touch screen machines to paper-based systems, such as optical scanners or computers with printers) and the cost of developing procedures for conducting hand-counted audits using independent, random selection of at least 2 percent of the precincts for audits under public observation.

If the bill does not pass or jurisdictions do not opt in, six complete states and some number of counties in 14 other states will be conducting completely unauditable elections in 2008. In addition, only about a dozen states will conduct audits.

Holt noted that the main objection to the bill was, according to Republicans, its projected $554 million cost.

“I’d like to ask the opponents how much spending is too much to have verifiable elections in the United States. I note that many people who opposed this legislation supported spending almost $330 million in recent years to provide election assistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I would have hoped those who supported efforts to export democracy abroad would be equally committed to strengthening democracy here at home,” Holt said.