[House Hearing, 107 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
VOTING TECHNOLOGY HEARING
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 17, 2001
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Printed for the use of the Committee on House Administration
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BOB W. NEY, Ohio, Chairman
VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan STENY H. HOYER, Maryland, Ranking
JOHN L. MICA, Florida Minority Member
JOHN LINDER, Georgia CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania
JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California JIM DAVIS, Florida
THOMAS M. REYNOLDS, New York
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Professional Staff
Paul Vinovich, Staff Director
Bill Cable, Minority Staff Director
VOTING TECHNOLOGY HEARING
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THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2001
House of Representatives,
Committe on House Administration,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 11:04 a.m., in room
1310, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Robert W. Ney
(chairman of the committee), presiding.
Present: Representatives Ney, Ehlers, Linder, Hoyer, Fattah
and Davis.
Staff Present: Paul Vinovich, Counsel; Roman Buhler,
Counsel; Jeff Janas, Professional Staff Member; Chet Kalis,
Professional Staff Member; Luke Nichter, Staff Assistant; Sara
Salupo, Staff Assistant; Keith Abouchar, Minority Professional
Member; Cynthia Patton, Minority Professional Member; Matt
Pincus, Minority Professional Member; Bob Bean, Minority Staff
Director; and William Glunz, Research Assistant.
The Chairman. The Committee on House Administration will
come to order. We are holding our third hearing on election
reform. Today we will be focusing on voting technology, and I
do want to say it is a pleasure to be here today with Ranking
Member Steny Hoyer, as well as all of the members of the
committee, Mr. Linder of Georgia, to examine voting machine
technology.
Thank you to the vendors that are here today who have
showcased your voting equipment and have traveled far distances
to be here in Washington, DC to appear before us. I believe we
owe it to ourselves to determine how technology can ensure an
accurate and fair voting process. Also, the voting bells are
ringing. I should mention, which means a 15-minute vote. So I
am going to just have the rest of my opening statement for the
record, see if there is any other opening statements and we
will process--begin the hearing.
Mr. Hoyer. Mr. Chairman, just thank you very much. Just
briefly, this is the third hearing of our series regarding
electoral reform. I want to congratulate, again, Chairman Ney
for his leadership on this and for making sure that we move
forward as promptly as possible on this critical issue.
This is a nuts-and-bolts hearing that we are having today
which is critically important, not because we are going to make
the decision on this committee as to what nuts and bolts are
used--we expect those decisions to be made at the local level--
but it will give us a better understanding of what confronts
local and State election officials.
I want to include, Mr. Chairman, the rest of my statement
in the record. I look forward to hearing the information. I
want to say as an aside that I had the opportunity to talk with
Mr. Hart yesterday. I know they did election in Hyattsville in
my district, just about 5, 6 miles from here. I know that went
well, and I know--I had an opportunity to talk to most of you
yesterday as well and looked at your technology and had the
opportunity to use some of the technology.
I was very impressed with all of it and very impressed with
the concerns that are given to assuring those with
disabilities, whether they be sight or mobility or hearing
disabilities, have full access to the polling place and are
able to privately cast their votes. That is obviously a
critical component of any system I think, particularly as it
relates to the efforts at the Federal level through the
Disabilities Act signed by President Bush in 1990 to assure
full inclusion of those with disabilities.
So Mr. Chairman, I want to congratulate you and thank you
and thank all of our witnesses for being here and for providing
their technology for display and for education for members and
staff. Thank you.
STATEMENTS OF TOM DAVIS, MANAGING MEMBER, VICE CHAIRMAN AND CO-
FOUNDER, DIVERSIFIED DYNAMICS; WILLIAM F. WELSH II, CHAIRMAN,
ELECTION SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE; BRIAN J. O'CONNOR, EXECUTIVE
VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL ELECTION SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED; DAVID E.
HART, CHAIRMAN AND FOUNDER, HART INTERCIVIC; RICHARD E. CARUSO,
FOUNDER/CHAIRMAN, SHOUP VOTING SOLUTIONS, INCORPORATED; AND
MARLENE DUFFY YOUNG, REGIONAL MARKETING REPRESENTATIVE, UNILECT
The Chairman. Thank you very much, and our witnesses today
are Tom Davis, managing member, vice chairman and co-founder,
Diversified Dynamics, Richmond, Virginia; William F. Welsh II,
chairman of Election Systems and Software, from Omaha,
Nebraska; Brian J. O'Connor, executive vice president, Global
Election Systems, Incorporated, McKinney, Texas; David E. Hart,
chairman and founder of Hart InterCivic, Austin, Texas; Dr.
Richard E. Caruso, founder/chairman of Shoup Voting Solutions,
Incorporated, Quakertown, Pennsylvania; and Marlene Duffy
Young, regional marketing representative, UniLect, Dublin,
California.
Welcome and we will begin with Mr. Davis.
STATEMENT OF TOM DAVIS
Mr. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, members
of the committee, as you have addressed the critically
important issue of election reform, allow me to say thank you
for the opportunity to present testimony for your
consideration. I am grateful for this opportunity to offer my
perspective and to respond to the question, can we act quickly
and effectively to correct the systemic problems that are
inherent in the vast majority of America's current voting
system? Can we do it in a way that will allow the overwhelming
majority of the citizens to be confident in these processes and
satisfied that democracy works.
The answer is yes, but it can only be accomplished with our
help within the time frame that American citizens are
demanding. The deeply ingrained crisis of confidence that
Americans have in our current voting processes is well
deserved. For too long, too little resources were allocated to
replace the vase majority of America's unreliable voting
systems, but very few citizens were aware of the tolerated
margins of error that continue to exist in the majority of our
polling places. Well, they know about it now.
I especially want to commend the committee's ranking
member, Congressman Steny Hoyer, for introducing the bipartisan
Voting Improvement Act. Congressman Hoyer's bill acknowledges
the critical importance of providing Federal financial
assistance to States as they struggle with how to pay to fix a
problem that we all know needs fixing.
I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate
committee member, John Linder of Georgia, for the efforts that
his State is taking to improve the voting process. Under the
leadership of Georgia Secretary of State, Kathy Cox, Georgia
has overwhelmingly, with strong bipartisan support, passed
Georgia Senate bill 213 and has begun the process of selecting
and installing a uniform Statewide voting system prior to the
presidential elections of 2004.
This Congress can ensure that that goal is met in Georgia
and in every other State that chooses to act in accordance with
the wishes of the majority of the American people. Likewise, if
this Congress refuses to respond to citizens' crisis of
confidence, I believe that you will be inviting an avalanche of
litigation, probably centered on the equal protection clause;
and if by 2002 or 2004 we have done little or nothing to
correct the current problems with America's voting systems,
since they were revealed to all of us, I believe that the
probable scenario could be far worse and much more expensive
for out citizens to remedy and to endure than to begin to
repair these problems now.
We have the technology and the manufacturing capacity in
the United States to solve this problem. We have available the
IT and systems integrations technology. We have it today. What
we need are partnerships. This industry, the largest company in
this industry, has 400 members. What you need to concentrate on
is not what it costs to buy a unit, but what it costs to make
one. We have the technology available. There are ways to
finance this system. There are people, Fortune 500 companies
that will team and come together and help these companies in
this industry get this job done for America.
I think we ought to look at different ways of doing
business there are many, many ways to approach this problem.
Thank you very much, and I ask for the balance of my statement
be put in the record.
The Chairman. Without objection.
And Mr. Welsh.
STATEMENT OF WILLIAM F. WELSH III
Mr. Welsh. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
committee. I would like to thank you for giving us the
opportunity to express our opinions and to seriously examine
the issues that are underlying the whole election reform
process, and what role the Federal Government should play in
it.
The fundamental truth in our industry is that funds for
modern election technology have not had a high priority, even
though at the State and at the local level, as well as the
vendors within the industry, know how to fix these problems.
The whole issue of spending priorities at local government, I
can tell you unequivocally, that snowplows and road graders
will win over election systems every time. And so the answer to
our problem is money, not technology. We have the technology
and it is in place.
Despite the rhetoric that has gone on over the last 4 or 5
months since November, there has been little done except for
what was noted earlier in Georgia and in Florida that has
resulted in definitive action on changing out some of these
outmoded systems. The fact that we are talking about it has had
a predictable result of slowing down the actual conversion
process. There are many jurisdictions who would choose to move
forward, but in the absence of knowledge of what may happen out
of Congress relative to funding has prevented them from moving
forward.
The questions you ask, could we make a meaningful change
between 2002 and 2004, I would tell you that time is our enemy
as well as money. We are currently wasting a tremendous amount
of time in dialogue and not enough time in actually
implementing the solutions. If I had to give you a rough
estimate today, the answer would be no to both questions. To
change out all of those punch card systems as an example, which
involves over 599 counties, over 55,000 precincts, and over
40,000,000 registered voters is not something that can be just
done overnight.
If you just took a look at the average size of the industry
sales for the last 4 or 5 years and divided it into that
problem, you are talking about 6\1/2\-plus years to change out
at average sales rates the punch card systems to optical scan,
or if you were to change to DRE, you could be talking as long
as 27 years.
Now those are historical numbers. The industry can ramp up
its manufacturing capacity. I don't believe that it is going to
be machine limited. I think it will be, however, people-
resource limited, and each of us have full-time staffs that
help jurisdictions make these changes.
The real issue that we have in front of us today is the
time to implement realistically so that you have quality
elections for 2002 and quality elections for 2004 are limited.
If you add on the time to negotiate contracts with each and
every one of these jurisdictions to the actual implementation
process, it is going to take a long time.
You asked the question about costs. I think costs are
coming down as we speak today. I would also make the statement
that the current certification process works well but it needs
to be expanded. We need to have more resources devoted to
certifying equipment, and we need follow through to make
certain that the equipment being shipped actually meets those
certification requirements.
I think that in terms of what the FEC is doing today in
promulgating new standards would also help, and I understand
that is going to be finished by the end of August this year. So
the answer is money, not technology. We need time also.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. O'Connor.
STATEMENT OF BRIAN J. O'CONNOR
Mr. O'Connor. Mr. Chairman, members of the committee,
esteemed colleagues, I would like to thank you for this time
and the opportunity to address the committee on these several
pertinent issues. It is difficult to address and clarify the
issue in the short time allotted, so I will be brief and
address all four of the specific issues.
The Chairman. I am sorry to have to interrupt. We have got
to cast a vote and we will be back right away. We want to hear
your whole testimony, so if you could bear with us.
Mr. O'Connor. Will I have two minutes and forty seconds
now?
The Chairman. We are going to reset your clock. This will
work accurately.
[Recess.]
The Chairman. House administration committee will reconvene
and we will begin again with Brian J. O'Connor. Thank you.
Mr. O'Connor. Thank you, again. Ladies and gentlemen, I
would like to take this time to thank you for the opportunity
to address the committee on these several pertinent issues. It
is difficult to address and clarify these issues in the short
time allotted, so I will be brief and address all four of the
published questions.
From your perspective, what Federal action would facilitate
technological improvements in the voting process? From our
perspective the technology is here, approved and available
immediately. The acceptance of this by the public and the
election officials is behind the power curve. If we can
transmit secure information in defense, intelligence, banking
and national security, why is it so hard to accept the fact
that votes can be secured as well? The government should
provide funding not to purchase equipment but to support the
infrastructure behind electronic voting. Once the
infrastructure is in place, the voting equipment cost
dramatically falls because the equipment becomes an appliance.
The next questions is does the industry have the capacity.
Yes, if we act now. We cannot wait till 2003 to complete the
task in 1 year. A governmental plan would enable the industry
to address the marketplace as a whole instead of a system-by-
system scenario that currently exists. For those vendors that
have a modular designed hardware such as global scaling, your
production runs for additional capacity is already designed in.
Reducing the cost of voting equipment. Reduction of
equipment costs comes when electronic voting is supported by an
electronic infrastructure. Until then we are subject to
relatively small individual orders of various equipment.
What can be done to improve the voting certification
process? As Mr. Welsh and Mr. Davis both said, the process we
have today is sound, but the original premise of NASED was an
outstanding premise of having a national ITA certify the
election hardware and software and remove the certification
burden from the States. In addition, this was to create a
uniform standard by which vendors could develop and produce
products that were not State or county specific. What we have
today is not uniform. The ITA process is arduous, time
consuming and expensive. We have one ITA for hardware and
resident software and one ITA for software management systems.
This is causing bottlenecks. My question always has been why do
we utilize private companies for the ITA process when several
major universities have expressed serious interest and have the
resources to perform, such as George Mason University here in
the D.C. area.
Secondly, State acceptance of ITA certification standards
is not uniform. Some States require ITA. Some State do not.
Some acknowledge ITA certification as their own. Others require
additional state certification on top of the ITA. We need a
uniform standard with multiple ITAs which will give the public
better, more secure and reduced costs.
Thank you very much for your time.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Mr. Hart.
STATEMENT OF DAVID E. HART
Mr. Hart. Thank you, Chairman Ney, members of the
committee. I appreciate the opportunity to be here to testify
before you today.
Hart InterCivic has been in the election business since
1912, and we serve about 5,000 election customers and do about
2,500 elections per year in election services, and it is in
that context I would like to comment on the four questions that
you have specifically put to this panel.
Your first question has to do with the industry having the
capacity to replace voting equipment by the 2002, 2004
elections. This is a frequently asked question within this
industry, not only by this panel but by our customers, owing
primarily to the fact that the existing suppliers in this
industry are not large companies in general, and there is
concerns about scale up and deployment and support.
In that context, I would like to say that I also believe
that what will happen will be gradual over time. Just because
some counties had problems in Florida with the punch card
doesn't mean that all of them are going to get rid of their
punch card systems. We think this will be a more measured
replacement process over time.
However, we think that there are trends emerging in this
industry to address the potential demand. These are new
companies coming to the market, manufacturing integration
partners, those that have entirely new solutions. We are seeing
companies that have established manufacturing processes such as
Dell, Compaq, IBM coming in the marketplace, integrators such
as Accenture and Unisys are also expressing interest in coming
into the marketplace, and we believe there will be capacity to
meet accelerating demand in the future.
But there are several variables that will affect our
ability to do this as an industry, and certainly the
certification process is a gating item. Integration with legacy
systems, and of course, funding will be a gating item as well
for our ability to meet the demand.
You have asked about what improvements can be made to the
certification process, and this is clearly a key. There are two
issues. There are guidelines and then there is the capacity to
certify systems in a timely manner. There are processes already
existing within the FEC and the Election Commission to do this.
It is a question of resources, the resources needed to be
devoted to address what is now coming on the market today in
new systems.
You have asked about the ability for systems to be reduced.
I can tell you in the short time that we have actually been
doing the DRE systems, systems have dropped almost in half in
terms of pricing today. As demand increases, there will be an
increase in economies and in the supply chains, and we believe
there will be an ever-decreasing price level for these systems
as demand increases.
Also I would also suggest that you talk about the total
cost of ownership of systems, which includes employee drain for
the elections administrators as well as all the administrative
costs and ballot costs and so forth, not just focus on the one-
time equipment costs associated with it.
Finally, you asked what could be done for the Federal
action to facilitate technological improvements? Again, I would
say there are many, many improvements made just since the
presidential election in 2000. Accessibility technology is
light-years ahead of where it was a year ago, and there is no
reason that any polling place shouldn't be accessible today
from an equipment standpoint.
Audit trails, security, all those issue related to
conducting an election have been vastly improved and can be
improved in a very short period of time. Again, it comes back
to our ability to present these to compare them to standards
and bring them to market based on certification process.
Thank you very much for your time.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Caruso.
STATEMENT OF RICHARD E. CARUSO
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask that my
statement be included as part of the record.
The Chairman. Without objection.
Mr. Caruso. Good morning. My name is Richard Caruso and I
am the CEO of Shoup Voting Solutions in Quakertown,
Pennsylvania. I would like to thank Chairman Ney, Ranking
Member Hoyer, and the other members of the committee for the
opportunity to appear here today.
In the past century, more than 300 countries in 33 States
have successfully used Shoup voting equipment. In order to
preserve our democracy. Mr. Chairman, we must ensure that new
voting systems accurately and fairly represent the will of the
people. Conflicting voter registration roles, inadequate voter
education, poor poll worker training, ill-conceived ballot
designs, antiquated machinery and disparate voting methods all
undermine citizen confidence in our election system.
Makers of voting equipment including Shoup are currently
finalizing new state of the art systems with technology that
can help restore faith in our electoral process. Voting units
are currently available for order that detect undervoting and
overvoting, that allow for multiple language ballots, that are
ADA-compliant and make it easier for sight and hearing impaired
voters to cast ballots and provide quick accurate vote tallies.
Assuming that State and local governments had sufficient
resources to purchase them, voting systems like those I just
described could be put in place nationally in short order.
Resolve and resources, not technology, are the biggest barrier
to election reform. However, Mr. Chairman, it may be difficult
to significantly improve voter registration systems by the 2004
election cycle.
Voter registration systems must be able to prevent fraud
and other abuses without being so intrusive that citizens are
discouraged from voting. New voter registration systems involve
significant database, development costs and must strike the
right balance between preventing fraud and protecting voter
privacy. This presents a substantial challenge to actually
implementing improved systems.
Mr. Chairman, the Federal Government is essential to
assuring promising technologies play an important role in
election reform. Election reform cannot happen without
sustained congressional involvement. The key to Federal
involvement is not more study of the issue, but more resources.
Many State and local governments lack adequate resources to
purchase election equipment and services that effectively
protect an individual's right to vote.
Congress should expedite Federal money to State and local
governments to fund badly needed election reform. Congress
should use Federal money to encourage development of uniform
voting technology requirements. In addition to ensuring that
all voting systems meet proper standards consistent with 21st
century technology, uniform requirements will also reduce the
overall cost of election reform. Congress should insist that
voting systems meet minimum standards and practices, and Mr.
Chairman, we submitted a list of those minimum standards and
practices in our written testimony.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to appear here
today. I will be happy to answer any questions that you or the
other members of the committee have for me.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Marlene Young.
STATEMENT OF MARLENE YOUNG
Ms. Young. Thank you, Chairman Ney and members of the
committee. I appreciate. I appreciate the opportunity to be
here this morning.
I am Marlene Duffy Young with UniLect Corporation. UniLect
Corporation manufacturers the PATRIOT, a touch screen voting
system, the Nation's first. We are dedicated exclusively to
touch screen technology because we believe it is the superior
technology for voting.
My perspective as a vendor is a little bit different from
the others here today, because for 15 of the last 20 years, I
was a local elected official. I have been through six elections
of my own, including one very close race that took 4 months and
a court ordered hand recount to resolve. Mismarked paper
ballots, undervotes and overvotes, unreadable by counting
machines, were at the center of my dispute. The court-ordered
hand count changed the outcome of that election and required a
change of elected officials months into the term, a costly,
difficult and nerve-wracking process for everyone.
The controversy dominated our local press for months and
kept county government in political turmoil during that period.
It, in fact, resulted in a grand jury investigation that found
no fraud, but concluded that the race was simply too close for
the machines to accurately count because of thousands of
mismarked ballots, ballots that were perfectly legal, but they
were simply unreadable by the central count optical scan
system. Thereafter our county did replace the central count
scan system with a precinct count system.
I share this to let you know that my insights and comments
reflect my personal experience as a taxpayer and a voter, and a
candidate as well, as my current interest in the technology of
touch screen.
My own controversy convinced me that there is no perfect
election system, but a paperless voting system is far superior
in reducing voter error and ensuring vote count accuracy.
Furthermore touch screen systems offer much better opportunity
to accommodate those with disabilities and handicaps. In fact,
UniLect manufactures a system, we call it the ``freedom unit,''
which is available for the blind or visually impaired and
allows those folks to vote totally independently.
That is why I am now with UniLect and promote the PATRIOT,
the Nation's most proven system that has been in use since
1995.
When you talk about the industry capacity to meet the need
to change out the systems, certainly by 2002, replacement of
all punch cards is tremendously ambitious. Personally, as a
former local elected official, I really think that government
constraints in terms of the budget making, the decision process
and procurement requirements may be more limiting than the
industry capacity to meet that need. In fact, local governments
are in their budget process right now and they are going to
have to make a decision very quickly within the next few months
about what they are going to be able to do put a new system in
place by 2002. Even by 2004 that is a very ambitious time
frame.
I certainly think that the industry can meet the demand
that will be out here, but other than those States, such as
Florida, which obviously has mandated change by 2002,
personally, I am not convinced that there is a compelling need
to change those out that quickly. A phased-in approach seems to
make more sense, and in fact these systems, all the systems
have some shortcomings, but in fact, most of them have worked
well in most instances and can meet the need.
What is compelling is evidenced at the Federal, State and
local level of decision makers to reform the selection process
at every level, including the voter data registration base,
voter education and training, and, of course, technology
improvements.
Established technology companies like UniLect should be
consulted and involved in the research and development of
technology improvements, but we really want to make the point
that technology improvements need to respond to rather than
dictate the needs of voters and election administrators. Jack
Gerbel, the President of our company who has been in this
business for 37 years, would caution that there is no silver
bullet or simple technology solution but that it really needs
to be a comprehensive answer.
In terms of the time frames, we certainly--and our system
can be implemented rather quickly. We can do in concurrently.
In fact, typically we can implement our system four months from
order time to the actual election, but again, we would say that
elections are a complex process impacted by the diversity of
our people and human error, and while no technology can
guarantee perfect elections every time, it is my opinion, base
on my real-life election drama, that a paperless voting system
is far superior to one requiring ballots because it eliminates
the issue of voter intent.
The Chairman. I hate to interrupt but we are running over
the time.
Ms. Young. Oh, I am very sorry. I was looking at the clock
and read it wrong.
The Chairman. That is okay. We could take the rest of your
testimony for the record.
Ms. Young. I would appreciate that. Thank you very much,
members.
The Chairman. I have a generic question I would like to
ask, but also as part of this I would like to focus in with Mr.
Davis and Mr. Welsh, just from listening to your testimony. The
generic question is, assuming you receive purchase orders by
the end of this year, that is, purchase orders that means we
get the bill out, the money is out to the locals, you receive
purchase orders by the end of the year, how many could you, or
could you produce any in time for deployment for 2002
elections?
Now, anybody is free to answer that, but also with Mr.
Davis and Mr. Welsh, I think the both of you, from what I have
listened to testimony, have a disagreement about how long it
will take to replace the systems, and I just wonder if you
could explain the different points of view and how long it
would take to get new systems in place, and anybody else would
like to answer also. I was just curious about the two of you
specifically.
Mr. Welsh. Well, in my particular case, my point was we can
manufacture the machines. I think the entire industry could
manufacture the replacement technology relatively quickly. What
I am concerned about is the actual implementation or
installation of these new systems replacing the old. The
combination of the election staff having to be trained, all new
software systems, all new voting systems, training poll
workers, educating voters, all those are critical. If we just
throw technology at this without proper education and training,
it is not going to work. It is not going to have the intended
result, and so our point is that it is the time to install
properly trained and educate everybody involved in the process
that is going to be the limiting item. It is not going to be
manufacturing capacity.
The Chairman. Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. Mr. Chairman, I think Mr. Welsh makes a good
point. I read this morning some of his comments in The USA
Today where he does have the largest company in the industry,
which is about 400 people. That is not the size company that
Diversified Dynamics wanted to partner with when we tried to
consider what this responsibility might be. I think that the
interest is, we went to very large companies. I did a thumbnail
sketch after I read that article, and the three companies that
I am teaming with just on the Georgia bid that is taking shape
now have approximately 123,000 employees. They have IT
capability, networking capability, infrastructure capability
and certainly manufacturing capability. I am more interested in
what the cost of the solution is.
When we focus on the cost of a single machine, I think we
are missing the point. The technology certainly exists, and the
companies are out there with the capabilities that want to do
business with us. That is what I have done that may be somewhat
different than other people, and that is why I believe it can
be done today. I have gone to companies that have historically
taken the most complex problems, technology problems in the
United States, and have solved those problems, and they have
asked to partner with us as well. So that is our approach and
that is probably a different approach.
The Chairman. It is tough for us because we try to
calculate it, as you can imagine, an average cost per machine,
how many punch card ballots are out there. You try to figure up
the money so you can get a bill in appropriation and get it out
there so we try to get estimates.
I am just curious about the generic question. Any of you,
could you deploy by 2002?
Mr. Hart. I would like to make a similar response that Mr.
Davis did. We also have put together an alliance, as I spoke in
my testimony, with larger companies that are in the integration
business that can deploy and scale up very quickly across the
country. Manufacturing, except for some long lead items that
may be associated with some of these manufacturing units is not
a problem. I do agree with Mr. Welsh that the actual
integration, the training, is a huge item in this but there are
organizations and businesses that can help scale up.
The Chairman. Now, wouldn't this depend too on how many
machines--let us say we pass the money down to the locals and
it would depend on how many localities you went to and how many
machines you got. The price would obviously vary whether you
are selling 1,000 machines or you are selling 500 or 10,000,
that price is going to vary, I assume of course, right? Could
that be how your industry works?
Mr. Hart. There is certainly economies of scale in
manufacturing as there are in other industries.
The Chairman. Well, let me ask this, which goes to the
point, if you have to outsource--or would you have to
outsource? Say you get large orders, would you have to
outsource or you can handle it internally, and if you outsource
that would obviously raise the price wouldn't it?
Mr. Hart. No, sir, quite the contrary. We prefer to
outsource. Our expertise is in elections and how elections
operate, and we have preferred to outsource the manufacturing
of our units to companies that contract manufacturing. These
are companies that manufacture computers for IBM, for Dell and
on a contract manufacturing basis, they have far more ability
to operate and make equipment at a much reduced unit cost than
any of the people sitting in this room today.
The Chairman. Does everybody agree with that?
Mr. Davis. I certainly agree with that.
Mr. Caruso. Mr. Chairman, I would say that the
implementation is really directly--the complexity of the
implementation is directly proportional to the complexity of
the systems that are being installed. I think our design
criteria is to have systems that are essentially as simple as
possible. In other words, we try to put ourselves in a position
of the poll workers and the voters, and the systems that we
have designed are designed for an easy transition. In other
words, even though we are using the latest technology, we are
not necessarily implementing every aspect of the technology
because we want it to be voter friendly and poll worker
friendly.
And so in effect even though you put in the new system, we
are envisioning the transition to be easier than perhaps just
throwing the technology at the electorate, if you will.
So I would say that if the implementation of systems is as
it was done in the past where you are putting in new systems
and you need substantial training, then it would take
substantial time. If we put in systems that are designed to
consider an ease of transition, then it would take less time.
In addition to that, I would envision that if Congress is
serious about reform, that historically the industry has gone
to the location to train poll workers and election officials,
and I would think that if there are standards, that there could
be central training locations where they come for a couple of
days and get training on an industry basis. And so therefore, I
see change in the way it is done as making it easier and time
efficient in terms of transition.
The Chairman. I had another question. Mr. Davis, I think it
was, had stated we should require NASED certification for all
the equipment and not to grandfather machines. Now, what would
we do about the machines that were not NASED certified?
Mr. Davis. I wouldn't put any money out at all for a
machine that couldn't qualify for NASED standards.
The Chairman. Even existing ones?
Mr. Davis. Oh, exactly. I think that has been the problem.
We are here to solve the problem that exists today, not to
continue to fund old machines. Many jurisdictions have
repeatedly gone out and purchased new equipment for
grandfathered systems only because those were the only units
that would work with their existing inventory. They were
operated on proprietary software programs and that has been
many of the problems that--that is what led to many of these
problems, old proprietary software programs as opposed to open
standards and systems that communicate and talk with one
another, printers that will operate with any system, voting
machines.
I think that the word ``appliance'' was used earlier, and
that is exactly a good point. A voting machine is not a
complicated piece of equipment. It is, in fact, an appliance
and it is outrageous that it costs 2- or 3- or 4- or $5,000. It
has cost that because we were--they were sold in small batches,
one at a time to jurisdictions, and I think everyone at this
time will agree that nobody is--all of the people aren't making
the right technology choices because they aren't all buying the
same system. That would be our argument. I think that there is
an open standard, though, that could be established where this
equipment should be able to work together, should be able to
operate under a software program that instead of having to come
back to an individual vendor, a jurisdiction could look to the
leadership of its State, and if somebody else could fix that
problem, then that software code ought to be available to them
so they can fix the problem.
The Chairman. I just have a couple of more questions. We
have all the members here and I don't want to take the time. So
just a brief answer from Mr. O'Connor, if I could. In your
written testimony you suggest university involvement for
research and development. How would this work considering the
time component in the sense that we have to hurry to make the
2002----
Mr. O'Connor. Well there are many universities around the
country that have expressed interest in doing some types of
certification for elections. George Mason University, at the
Keller Institute, for instance, is working with several
different ADA componentry that we have evaluated in putting
together our ADA compliant touch screen, and the bottleneck
that I am talking about is having one ITA for hardware and the
resident software on that hardware and one ITA for the
software. If all of us have our software into the ITA at the
same period of time, it is going to take a considerable amount
of time to get all of us passed. If we have several different
ITAs, particularly universities, we can eliminate that
bottleneck.
The Chairman. Ms. Young, your company operates in Chicago
now; correct?
Ms. Young. Our company is based out of Dublin, California.
The Chairman. But where are you operating out of--not
operating out of, but where do you have your machines?
Ms. Young. Our machines presently are in communities in
Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina and Michigan.
The Chairman. Are any of those communities mixed with punch
cards, in other words, with machines in other precincts?
Ms. Young. No. In the jurisdictions where we are it is
exclusively our machines.
The Chairman. Okay. And the final question I have was
actually to Dr. Caruso. In your written testimony you advocated
a national uniform voting system. Opponents--and we have heard
this before--of a national system contended if we make a
uniform standard, you could increase fraud. Do you think that
is true or not?
Mr. Caruso. No, Mr. Chairman. I think that rather than a
uniform system, I think what I was saying was uniform
standards. In other words, the individual standards that need
to be considered need to be standards that are in my written
testimony. I can give you just a few of them so you can get a
sense of exactly what it is that we are talking about here, and
that is, standards for funding essentially, allow the voter to
vote selected and correct any errors before a ballot is
actually cast; detect and prevent overvoting and unintended
undervoting, so that you have a clear identification for the
voter that the system needs to be user friendly to actually
take them through the process, and if they intend to undervote,
that is a conscious decision that they are undervoting. And I
have several of those standards.
Mr. Ney. I will have to read your testimony afterwards
then. Thank you.
Mr. Hoyer.
Mr. Hoyer. Dr. Caruso, let me ask you a question. Do you
think it would be appropriate for us to set forth those
standards in legislation, in other words, not designate
technology to be purchased at the local level, which I don't
think is either passable or appropriate, but standards clearly
for doing what you have just pointed out? It seems to me we
want to make sure that when the voter leaves the ballot booth
or the precinct, that they are confident that they did what
they intended to do.
Mr. Caruso. Yes, Mr. Congressman. I think that a set of
standards is essential to assure that the electorate in any
jurisdiction in the country will have the same opportunity to
vote. If you look at the vote as the foundation of the system,
then every vote in the country should have equal value. In
order for it to have equal value, it has to have the same
standard of consideration. And so that is the reason for
suggesting a listing of standards. Now, how those standards are
applied in individual systems is another matter. That allows
people to use creativity in the use of the technology but the
result is the same, an accurate fair vote.
Mr. Hoyer. Let me ask you something. In the legislation I
have introduced which Mr. Davis referred to and others have
discussed, we provide as you know for some RDT&E money, $10
million out of the $150 million. I think this figure is going
to go up, frankly, as we consider the legislation because I
think we have low-balled it based upon the testimony I have
heard. But do you think that will encourage the industry to
pursue upgrades in new technologies? This is a question for
everybody.
Mr. Davis. I would like to ask that, Mr. Hoyer. What we
have done is we have developed some patented technology that
has advanced quite a few of these applications. We believe
those features should be ubiquitous features and we have
offered and testified 2 years ago here in Washington that we
would make any of those improvements that we advanced, and we
would ask the other companies to make them available as well.
We believe that sets of standards where there is across-the-
board improvement should be standards such as audio ballot
technology. That should be a ubiquitous feature. A machine that
is not accessible to a person in a wheelchair should not get a
dime of funding from anybody in this day and age because there
are many, many alternatives to that type of equipment; yet it
is still being purchased. Those are the kinds of standards I
believe that everyone in the industry would adopt.
Mr. Hoyer. Anybody else want to comment on that?
Mr. Welsh.
Mr. Welsh. I would like to make a couple of comments. The
impression you might get from some of the comments that have
been made here is that this is a vast technological wasteland,
and I would like to correct that misnomer. It is not. All of us
have been working diligently over the last 5, 6, 7 years,
advancing the state of the art, advancing the technology. The
issue has not been the inability for jurisdictions to have
access to this technology. The issue has been the will, the
priorities and the funding to make it happen.
Mr. Hoyer. Let me ask some quick questions and hopefully
quick answers, and you can expand upon these perhaps for the
record. Do you have any suggestions on how technology can help
improve our Armed Services voting system? Have you considered
that? Obviously we have had some problems. We want to make sure
our people overseas can vote as well as everybody here at home.
Mr. Hart. I will just jump in. I believe that that is
probably the first place where you will actually see an
Internet application and approved voting, and because of the
environment in the military, I think that is a great
opportunity to begin to find out the viability of Internet
application for voting, and I think that is where some effort
should be concentrated.
Mr. Hoyer. Anybody else have a comment on that?
Mr. Caruso. If I have a concentration of voters from one
particular jurisdiction or one particular State in a particular
area overseas, it is entirely possible actually to have
equipment over there that stores--electronically stores every
ballot in the State, if you will, so there is an opportunity to
have those individuals actually vote on a system as well, but I
do also agree that Internet is the opportunity.
Mr. Welsh. Our company has had a long standing relationship
with the DOD and the FVAP Program, the Federal Voting
Assistance Program, and we continue to work with them in trying
to find ways to improve that process. In fact, we do have an
Internet application that will be tested. We also have another
technology that we all AVA, or anywhere voting technology,
architecture actually, and that will probably also be tested.
Mr. Hoyer. Let me ask another question if I can. Voter
registration, I think one or two of you mentioned that, but Dr.
Caruso mentioned it. Obviously, that is a huge problem in terms
of lack of central, accessible, immediate verification of
whether somebody's registered or not within a State. I know
must of you are probably not working on that aspect. Am I
correct on that or not?
Mr. Welsh. No.
Mr. Hoyer. Would you comment on that?
Mr. Welsh. Yes. Our company has about 400 local
jurisdictions that are on our voter registration systems, and
we have four States, including your own, that is installing and
have installed and are operating centralized voter registration
databases, and they are very effective, and they work quite
well in terms of minimizing duplications of registrants and
things like that.
As concerns fraud, one of the issues that constantly
confounds us when we look at the data that we get back from the
installation of these systems is the amount of duplication of
registrants which is predictable. As people move within a
jurisdiction, oftentimes they don't report that they have
moved, and we end up with this duplication process.
On the other hand, just having a centralized voter
registration system does not guarantee that you are not going
to have somebody in a border State and a border application be
able to move across border as an example and actually
perpetrate a fraud in terms of voting twice. I think the
occurrence of that is very, very low however.
Mr. Hoyer. Let me make a comment. I have been involved in
elections for a long time, since 1962, I guess, elected in
1966. In Maryland, I was the sponsor of the registration by
mail along with several--Senator Byrd in 1973. Our election
officials had huge concerns, not a partisan concern at all, but
huge concerns, mostly Democrats, about fraud. Frankly, in the
last 27, 28 years now, that apparently has not been a problem.
So I have found the same thing you have, Mr. Welsh, that fraud
really is not a huge problem.
Mr. Welsh. If there is any, it is so minimal that it
probably could not have any real meaningful impact on the
election.
Mr. Hoyer. Last question if I can, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Ehlers. Would the gentleman yield on that?
Mr. Hoyer. Certainly.
Mr. Ehlers. I think the fraud that we have discussed before
is not fraud in the actual voting process so much as the
fraudulent registration process which you are not involved in.
I just wanted to clarify that point.
Mr. Hoyer. Of course, the mail ballot is the registration
process, and I think all of us agree that if we had false
registration, we need to stop that and catch it. None of us
want, hopefully, people registering who are not eligible to
vote.
The other question I wanted to ask, and I will end with
this, and I have got other questions, but maybe all of you
could just speak to it briefly. One of the issues is going to
be provisional balloting. Do all of your technologies provide
for a provisional ballot, and in fact, a set-aside ballot which
can be then verified as to eligibility of that voter casting
it, which ties in, of course, with the uniform or central
registration? But on of the problems I know in Prince George's
County, in particular, relatively large mobile jurisdiction is
the problem, well, I may have moved a precinct but I am really
registered to vote, well, we don't have you on the books here,
and allowing provisional balloting. Let me ask all of you to
comment on that.
Mr. Young. Yes, sir. Thank you Congressman. Our touch
screen system already does accommodate provisional balloting,
yes, it does.
Mr. Hoyer. So that somebody can vote, you set aside that
particular vote for verification later?
Ms. Young. Absolutely. And it is very easily done. Of
course, Florida just mandated that requirement for provisional
balloting. So any system is going to have to meet that
standard.
Mr. Hoyer. It seems to me Dr. Caruso, that from my
standpoint, that ought to be one of the standards we include.
Mr. Caruso. Exactly, and that is one of the standards that
would be included in our system as well and it is easy to do
with electronic systems.
Mr. Hoyer. Mr. Hart.
Mr. Hart. Our system presently accommodates provisional
ballots.
Mr. O'Connor. Global system does as well and has for many
years.
Mr. Welsh. All of our systems do and have for many years.
Mr. Hoyer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have got other
questions, but I will wait for the next round if there is one.
If not I will submit some questions for each of you.
The Chairman. Just mini-second follow up. Is that set aside
electronically and there are names with it or numbers assigned?
If you are doing it by paper that is one story.
Mr. Davis. It is a feature set based on the false standards
that jurisdictions want to employ for our system. They can
either use an absentee ballot and cast a provisional vote that
way or they can assign a number and do it electronically. It is
their choice.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Ehlers.
Mr. Ehlers. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I won't have many
questions for the panel. I apologize, I missed your testimony,
but I was chairing another committee on a markup.
I just wanted to continue this issue about fraud briefly,
and that is, I think there are substantial problems in this
Nation concerning registration fraud and, in particular, as the
gentleman from Maryland observed, surrounding the mail-in
ballot, which is almost simultaneously registration. I think
that is very dangerous and something that this committee
certainly should address as it pertains to the Federal
elections.
I was appalled when I reviewed this some time ago to find
the practices of some States are very simple, that you can, for
example, just pick up a postcard at a post office and fill it
in and send it in, and you are automatically registered. You
are never checked to see whether you are a citizen of this
country, a legal resident of this country and never checked in
any way.
The other problem is, of course, that people are not purged
from the list when they move from one jurisdiction and register
in another jurisdiction. They can easily vote in both places,
and it would not be detected under any system we have now. So I
just wanted to lay that issue out clearly.
While I am ranting and raving up here I would like to add
one other thing. I am very concerned about the mail-in ballot
procedure in some States, particularly Oregon and also the
rapid increase in absentee balloting. For example, in my State,
anyone over the age of, I think it is 62, perhaps it is 65,
automatically is eligible for the absentee ballot whether they
have a good reason for needing one or not.
Maybe my reasons are more political than otherwise, but I
just don't think it is approriate. Quite often I have to vote
absentee because I am in Washington when the elections are
being held back home, and I have noticed that when I get the
ballot, most of the candidates have not yet contacted me. They
have not presented their case to the public, and I think that
is an essential part of the campaign process. So I wait until
the last minute, so I hear everything and I have some facts
from which I can make some decisions.
I think, frankly, the best way is to use the machine. You
be there on Election Day. It means you are exposed to all the
other information everyone else is and we should optimize the
number of people that go to the polls.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I am finished ranting and raving.
The Chairman. It was a very pleasant rant and rave, on a
scientific level.
Mr. Ehlers. Right. I am pretty low key.
The Chairman. Anybody want to answer the rant or the rave
part?
Mr. Caruso. I do, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, there are a
number of issues that perhaps are primary issues, but maybe not
necessarily for this particular convening, but some of the
issues to address, Congressman Ehlers' comment, one way of
dealing with that is to extend the voting period. In other
words, there is no particular reason why the vote has to occur
in one day, in a few hours, with lots of lines, et cetera.
There are ways of dealing with these issues, and I would
encourage the committee actually to open up their minds to
other opportunities actually, to make the whole process a lot
easier for the electorate.
In addition to that, one barrier which I guess we don't
like to discuss, but we probably should discuss, and the
committee should be conscious of this, is many of our elected
officials in this country are elected under the existing
system, and so, therefore, one of the unspoken problems, if you
will, is resistance to change because of fear, if you will,
that if it does change, that maybe it is going to change a
result in some fashion and another. And I think the committee
at least needs to be conscious of that fear.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Mr. Fattah.
Mr. Hoyer. Can I just make an intervention?
Dr. Caruso, I agree with you. What I have said when I talk
to people, I think there is some intellectual reasons to oppose
campaign finance reform. I am for it, but I think there are
some intellectual reasons under the first amendment, but I
don't think that is an intellectually justifiable reason,
notwithstanding the fact I agree with you, that you are
correct, that it may be an underlying concern, but the American
public ought not to stand still for not making a system that
works best for them, not for us.
Mr. Caruso. We agree, Congressman.
Mr. Hoyer. But I think it is important to raise the issue,
but that simply is not an intellectually defensible reason not
to put on line the best technology we have to facilitate people
voting and having their vote accurately counted. You make a
good point.
Mr. Fattah. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me apologize for
being late. I have a hearing going on with FEMA relative to
their appropriations.
But I wanted to, as I understand it, President Carter and a
number of other of our former Presidents who are involved in
the whole monitoring of international elections have said that
if circumstances of the elections that take place here in our
own country would not pass muster in terms of what is required
in terms of us judging an election as being fairly conducted in
other places around the globe, and I was wondering whether any
of your companies are doing business in other places and
whether you could comment on just whether that is a fair
characterization, that there are places where the conduct of
these elections are better handled in terms of fraud prevention
and counting of votes and the like.
Mr. Welsh. I can answer that question. From our viewpoint,
we do a fair amount of business outside the continental United
States, both in Canada, countries like Venezuela, the
Philippines, and I would say that their comments are probably
more based on the voter registration process rather than the
actual conducting of the election. Many of these countries have
national ID cards, photo ID cards for voting purposes, and
whether or not something like that would be both politically
and culturally acceptable here in the United States is probably
open to question, but I think that is what they are referring
to, although in places like Venezuela where they automated the
entire country using precinct-based optical scanning systems,
so they ended up with a national uniform standard for
conducting their elections.
Mr. Fattah. We are kind of two minds all at the same time,
which is that we want to make sure that the people who are
voting are citizens, but we don't want to--the same people who
are very concerned about that are the same people who are
adamantly opposed to any type of national ID or national
standard. So it is difficult sometimes to get your arms around
some of the philosophical contradictions that take place.
But I think that, you know, I first of all want to commend
you for your presentation and I got a chance and my staff did,
too, some of the products that are available, and I think that
you are right, that as a general matter, the technological
capabilities exist for us to do a lot better than we are doing,
but the political will vis-a-vis the other choices that local
officials have to make about police protection, fire
protection, trash collection, a whole range of issues in which
perhaps their future elections will be judged in a more
determinate way take precedent over the purchasing of the
machinery for our democracy in that there is both the
constitutional requirement under a number of parts of the
Constitution as related to Federal elections and to the rights
of Americans to vote, that there is a role for the Federal
Government to become involved.
So I want to thank the chairman and the ranking member for
holding the hearing, and again, I apologize I have to
disappear, but I have another committee that is meeting and
going on, and we don't organize the Congress as well as even we
organize our luncheons yet. So thank you very much.
The Chairman. Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis of Florida. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just have
one question which may be very difficult for you all to answer,
but it gets back to the politics of this. I think the substance
is really pretty clear, and you all, like every group of
witnesses who have come in, have remarkable consistency in your
testimony, and reasonable people would disagree, but this
committee can write a good bill and our chairman and Mr. Hoyer
are committed to that.
But where we face the biggest challenge is the politics
that this bill will encounter as it moves on, but the Florida
legislature in my State overcame that, and I will tell you come
polling done that said Democrats and Republicans, you better
fix these machines, we don't care who wins. We know who loses
if nothing happens, and it is not just us. It is you. So they
fixed them.
My question is can you all say categorically today that the
types of improvements we are discussing here are really not
going to clearly tell the direction of any political party
because the ramifications are sufficiently broad it can cross
all the voting patterns that you might be terribly familiar
with because of your acute knowledge of elections?
Mr. Welsh. I would say that neither party or any of the
parties that are on the ballot are going to be affected
positively or negatively by what happens in this process. So I
think it should become a nonpartisan issue.
Mr. O'Connor. I would agree.
Mr. Caruso. I would agree.
Mr. Davis. We developed nonpartisan standards. We look at
things that are potential influencers that may have nothing to
do with party, but just in the physical connectivity of the
unit, what the interface might be or look like, what the screen
looks like or how it might be displayed. Those things really
can influence elections. So those are the things that you have
to look at as you are looking at different types of technology,
it you think there is some clandestine way to approach the
influence from maybe one side or the other. So you need to look
at the clear presentation of ballots but those should be your
concerns.
The Chairman. So nobody has a donkey or an elephant
flashing in the middle of the screen?
Mr. Davis. Or red light or green light.
Mr. Welsh. No banner ads.
The Chairman. It is a great question, and I think what it
does is each party, whoever votes, is going to be accurately
reflected in the vote. I think so much hype--I agree with Mr.
Davis--has been made here, well, if you do this or you do
that--I am not sure, I think good candidates and voter drives
and different things people do, all combine together. It is a
great question.
Mr. Hoyer. If the gentleman will yield, you know, the point
I made in one of our earlier hearings was that I found very
interesting that in Florida, if you counted the votes the way
George Bush wanted to count them, Gore wins. If you counted the
way Al Gore wanted, Bush wins. I think that tells us all that
we really don't know what the ramifications here are and what
our objective is, and this is what I was saying to Dr. Caruso,
is to make sure that the will of the voters, whatever that will
is, is reflected in our democracy accurately, but I think I
agree with you.
The Chairman. Mr. Hoyer, I vote for Mr. Gore's way to
count. I want to thank the panel so much for coming here. It is
tremendous. Personally speaking, this is the first time I have
ever not voted on a punch card. I have always voted on a punch
card. I know it is not a real election, but it is the first
time I have actually physically seen another machine. We have
always had punch cards. So for me, I know for Mr. Hoyer and the
other members that came, and the staff, it was a great learning
experience and we are going to take--the committee will be
recess for 10 minutes for the second panel to come up.
Mr. Hoyer. Before we go I would like to ask a quick
question because I have got an idea, which I am calling my--I
haven't discussed it with the chairman and I probably shouldn't
out it here, but a program I am calling the HAV program, H-A-V,
and I am going to talk with the chairman. I hope we can maybe
put it in the bill to do some incentives, help America vote. We
have got millions of students around America. How long would it
cost--how long would it take to train a student to be an
effective participant in precincts in helping run elections?
Mr. Davis. Mr. Chairman, that is probably one of the
biggest advantages we feel that we have. When we developed our
system, it is a completely wireless system. It is not tethered
to anything. It only weighs about 6 pounds, and it is very easy
to take those machines into the schools and register kids to
vote. You can actually construct an election right on site and
show them of an interest that may be theirs uniquely, and show
them how to take advantage of it and talk to them about the
process of democracy.
Mr. Welsh. You know, Venezuela is an interesting country in
terms of--it is a Third World country in many ways, but very
sophisticated in other ways. We had to deal with 7,000
precincts countrywide with people who didn't really understand
technology. We employed over 10,000 university students and
technical trade students who were trained procedurally on how
to manage a precinct with the technology that was going to be
employed, and it worked wonderfully.
The Chairman. I wanted to tell Mr. Hoyer. We have that
program in our hometown and paying the students. We have it
now.
Mr. Hoyer. We ought to adopt it nationally and give
encouragement because there is just so--somebody mentioned this
at a previous hearing. I think this would be such a wonderful
opportunity because we don't have young people voting. Let me
tell you what I do as a politician. I try to get a precinct
worker for every hour the precinct is open in Maryland. That is
13 hours. Not on the theory that I need somebody working the
precinct, but on the theory that they will bring their mother,
their father, their son, their daughter to the place to vote if
we do that. I am convinced if we get young people into these
polling places working, seeing how it goes, they are going to
get excited and bring other students in, and we will have all
sorts of positive results of a program like that.
The Chairman. We have less than 3 minutes on our vote.
Mr. Hoyer. Dr. Caruso.
Mr. Caruso. I think you make an excellent point, and I
think one of the subtleties of your point is the fact that
there is great apathy among young voters, and I think part of
that apathy is the antiquated voting equipment and the fact
that they come in and there is----
Mr. Hoyer. These computers mesmerize these young folks.
Mr. Caruso. Yeah. There is a distrust of the process just
because of the antiquity of the system.
Mr. Hoyer. My concept is the HAV program would be a little
bit like VISTA, you know, helping America vote, will beget
these young people from colleges, community colleges, or
technical schools all across America involved in their local
precincts.
The Chairman. I want to thank the panel. The committee will
be in recess for 10 minutes and we will have the second panel
when we reconvene. Thank you.
[Recess.]
The Chairman. The House Administration Committee will come
back to order, and we have panel two and appreciate your
indulgence while we voted.
STATEMENTS OF JAMES MINADEO, PRODUCT MANAGER, AVANTE; SCOTT
FAIRBAIRN, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, ENVOX U.S. LIMITED; MARK
STRAMA, VICE PRESIDENT, PUBLIC ELECTIONS, ELECTION.COM; DAVID
CHAUM, FOUNDER, SUREVOTE; RALPH MUNRO, FORMER SECRETARY OF
STATE, WASHINGTON, BOARD OF DIRECTORS, VOTEHERE; AND DENNIS
VADURA, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, WEB TOOLS INTERNATIONAL
The Chairman. James Minadeo, product manager, Avante,
Princeton Junction, New Jersey; Scott Fairbairn, regional sales
manager, Envox U.S. Limited, Austin, Texas; Mark Strama, vice
president, Public Elections, Election.com, Austin, Texas; David
Chaum--Dr. David Chaum, Founder, SureVote, Sherman Oaks,
California; Ralph Munro, former Secretary of State, Washington,
board of directors, VoteHere, Washington, D.C.; Dennis Vadura,
chief executive officer, Web Tools International, Newport
Beach, California. Thank you and we will start with Mr.
Minadeo.
STATEMENT OF JAMES MINADEO
Mr. Minadeo. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the
committee. My name is James Minadeo. I am the product manager
for Avante International Technology.
To answer the first question that we saw from your
committee was what new technology is out there in voting
equipment. Well, as a company, we got into the voting equipment
business November 8th, the day after, so to speak. What we did
was we looked at a few of the problems that existed and solved
a few of the problems.
The first one was the major question of whether your vote
was counted and was it counted correctly. The voter, until now,
had no idea whether their vote was counted and counted
correctly. What we did was we developed a machine that would
print out a receipt with a randomly generated number that would
tie only your vote to the receipt. You could then check your
vote after the election to see if it was counted and counted
correctly.
The second feature we incorporated was a no-vote option.
Basically, the voter has a choice between the candidates that
are in the contest or the write-in candidate or a no-vote
option. Therefore, the voter intent is clear, whether they
wanted to vote on not vote for a particular contest.
The third feature that was discussed earlier here was
overseas voting. What we have done using Smart Card technology,
is able to pull up a ballot from any jurisdiction within this
country correctly and able an absentee voter to vote. So an
example would be on an aircraft carrier, military personnel
could vote from their local jurisdiction, they would get a
card, it would pull up the correct ballot, they would vote, the
vote then could be sent at the same time or whatever time
designated, depending on where they are located within the
world, so that their vote could be counted at the same time as
everybody else's vote.
One of the other questions that you asked was related to
testing. We are currently in the testing process, and we have
noticed that one thing that the testing company should really
focus on is data security and management of the data as opposed
to reliability testing of the machine itself. We believe any
company should provide a reliable machine, but they don't focus
enough on the data security. Also, as I read today in the news,
the software testing company is even under consideration for
going bankrupt. So the need for additional resource for testing
is important.
As far as the cost and the availability of these systems,
our technology is based on off-the-shelf, so to speak,
components, and it represents, if we were to replace every
voting machine in this country, not just the punch cards, it
would represent only less than 1 percent of the current
computer capacity in this country. We believe also that by
using early voting, you can reduce the overall cost because you
would need less machines per voter in a jurisdiction.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you very much
Mr. Fairbairn.
STATEMENTOF SCOTT FAIRBAIRN
Mr. Fairbairn. Mr. Chairman, I would like to have my
testimony made part of my record.
The Chairman. Without objection.
Mr. Fairbairn. My name is Scott Fairbairn and I work for
Envox U.S., Limited. This testimony is based on my knowledge of
solving problems with the Envox 4.0 development communications
software and having a sister who has been quadriplegic for 50
years.
I am honored for this opportunity to appear before you
today. The Envox software provides the technology to build a
secure encrypted ballot utilizing the existing telephone
infrastructure integrated with bilingual speech recognition
and/or touch tone commands which simplify the process. Our
concept is to allow voters with disabilities to vote using
standard telephone equipment at their assigned polling places.
A voter that is blind or has physical limitations could vote
using their voice or the telephone key pad. In addition, by
using the telephone as a voting device, our disabled veterans
in VA hospitals, military personnel overseas and our seniors in
assisted living facilities could easily have real-time voting
voices.
My answers to your questions are this: I do not know if we
can replace all outdated machines by the 2002 or 2004 election.
The replacement of any technology should be rolled out in
phases. The primary purpose of the Envox software is to
simplify and accelerate the development cycle for customized
software solutions. With this technology we can help reduce
internal and external operating costs while eliminating
technology obsolescence.
Once a ballot is constructed using Envox, it can then be
stored on a single server or multiple computer servers for
scaleability and/or affordability. Smaller counties could share
server platforms to help minimize election costs, improve the
equipment certification process by allowing counties to use
COTS, commercial off-the-shelf technology. If the Department of
Defense has successfully adopted the COTS strategy, why
couldn't this approach be applied to voting technologies?
We can reduce voting equipment costs by utilizing proven
technology that provides scaleability, has already passed the
proof-of-concepts stage, and is used daily with reliability and
accuracy for our citizens, including citizens with the most
severe disabilities. Federal action could help improve
technology in the voting process by continuing what you are
doing today, by exploring the technologies that exist in
today's marketplace that can help improve and streamline the
voting process for all Americans. Congress can help improve the
voting process for the disabled community by convincing them
that their access to the voting system is not an afterthought,
but an equal right.
We must first provide the opportunity to vote at every
voting place, use a voting system that is universally
accessible, and three, provide a technology that is affordable
for a county.
This concludes my testimony, Mr. Chairman, on behalf of
Envox U.S. Limited. We thank you for this opportunity and as
well as our committee. Thank you sir.
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Fairbairn.
Mr. Strama.
STATEMENT OF MARK STRAMA
Mr. Strama. Thank you, and we appreciate this opportunity
as well.
Election.com is not currently in the voting machine
business. We sell open standard software for voter registration
database management and election administration. Our software
is compatible with hardware sold by any of the voting equipment
vendors. So I hope we will be able to offer you an insider's
perspective on the elections industry that is also independent
and objective.
I am going to skip the first question about scaleability
because I think I am going to answer it in my answer to the
third question. I am going straight to the certification
process.
Because we have never submitted a system for certification,
I can't comment from personal experience on the process, but we
would urge full funding of the FEC's Office of Election
Administration's efforts to complete the already-begun updating
of the voting systems standards, and we support standards that
require full accessibility for persons with disabilities.
With regard to how the costs of voting equipment can be
reduced, and this will also speak to scaleability, the
attractive sounding idea out there, and it is one we have
invested a great deal of research in, is that you can allow
voting on off-the-shelf touch screens that are networked to
local servers at the polling place. As desirable as this would
be in terms of both cost and scaleability, our conversations
with election officials indicate that this simply is not
practical for them at this point.
While it is possible to demonstrate this solution
successfully in isolated polling places, to implement the
solution on a wide scale on Election Day would be impossible
for Election Day poll workers as they are currently deployed.
Further, a server-based solution creates a single point of
failure at a polling site meant that if the server goes down,
the entire polling site is out of business. This is
unacceptable to every election official we have talked to, and
as soon as you start building in the redundancy in the servers
and in the network infrastructure that would address these
problems, you eliminate the cost savings that originally
justified the solution in the first place.
There is, however, an idea that I think makes a lot of
sense. One of our customers for our voter registration and
election management software, is a county that tabulates over
30 percent of its votes during an early voting period. During
this early voting period voters can vote at any one of 30
locations around the country. Then on Election Day, the county
operates about 300 polling locations for a 12-hour period. Some
of the election commissioners in this county have suggested
that if they could expand the number of early voting locations
to about 100, continuing to allow voters at any of them and
keep those locations open through Election Day, there would be
no need for the additional 200 voting sites.
The current model of conducting elections at hundreds of
thousands of polling locations on one day presents an enormous
and expensive logistical challenge to elections officials. They
are required to provide reliable equipment and confident
staffing for enough polling places to process over 100 million
votes in 15 hours. And yet out of all these polling places, an
individual voter can only go to one of them. So this huge
investment in a temporary infrastructure isn't really doing
anything to make the voting process more convenient to the
voter.
It seems to me that a system with half as many polling
places open for a longer period of time and where a voter can
vote at any of them would be more convenient and accessible for
the voter. It would significantly reduce the amount of
equipment counties have to purchase enabling them to invest in
superior technology and it would enable them to provide better
training and better compensation to a smaller number of
election workers, addressing one of the most important elements
of election reform.
Also, we would urge Congress as you consider funding, that
you consider the broad scope of election administration.
Running a successful election is a 365-day-a-year job, not a
one-day-a-year job. You have to look at the voter registration
database and all the election administration needs of the
counties.
Lastly, we support Internet voting for the military voters
and we appreciate this opportunity. Thanks.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Dr. Chaum.
STATEMENT OF DAVID CHAUM
Mr. Chaum. Thank you.
I believe we stand now at a crossroads with little middle
ground. We can either seize this chance to move towards best
practices and best election technology that our great country
has to offer, or we can dissipate this precious opportunity on
stopgap expedience, addressing short term that will leave us
with more of the same for a long time to come, at least until
someone rises to the challenge of redoing the whole system.
Most of the technology shown yesterday reminded me of the
proprietary devices that have long since gone out of existence
such as $30,000 Wang word processors. None of the major
technology companies was here yesterday. Why was that? Well,
one reason is I don't believe the counties have sufficient
resources to make informed decisions about these complex
technical products and systems. So called certification is
little more than a barrier to entry codifying the products of
the handful of current vendors and not giving any meaningful
criteria for comparing offerings.
What technology experts at the GAO have called a new
paradigm in election technology, described in my written
testimony, which I hope you can accept to the record, several
of you have tried yesterday, it yields systems that are far
superior in terms of voter confidence, privacy and integrity.
These open systems use no proprietary hardware and are fully
scalable, allowing very rapid rollout, and they cost less than
a 10th of the price you have been given by the industry.
So for a few hundred million dollars, elections across the
whole country could set a new global standard of excellence.
Yet, the certification process, it seems, may block these.
What do I recommend? Well, we need to find--in my written
testimony, you can see some of the motivation, but I think,
briefly, let me just flesh out what my proposal was. I think
that our great technology companies are national laboratories
and the deep expertise in the numerous parts of the government
can all be engaged by creating a national competition. I
believe that they will all rise to the call and challenge, or
at least the commercial opportunity.
NIST, having successfully executed similar competitions in
the past, could be charged, for example, with administering
such a national competition for election technology. The
competitors would be consortia. They could comprise industry,
national laboratories, government agencies and universities.
Qualifying consortia would each be asked to conduct a mock
election, according to realistic requirements specifications
under control conditions with close monitoring by experts. And
at the end of this, the panel of experts would decide which
systems are acceptable and criteria for Federal elections could
be formed around them.
Election technology is a complex enough problem, and the
stakes are certainly high enough to justify taking such an
approach while the alternative could be costly and damaging,
and the result of such a competition will be that we can move
ahead extremely expeditiously with confidence that we are doing
right by the precious fundamentals of democracy that we have
been entrusted with.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
STATEMENT OF RALPH MUNRO
Mr. Munro. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Ralph Munro,
And I have served for the last 20 years as Secretary of State
to the State of Washington, the chief election officer for our
State, the past President of the National Association of
Secretaries of State.
I believe that we are one of the first PC-based voting
companies, and we use off-the-shelf hardware and equipment. We
were founded in 1996. We have built relationships with Compaq,
Cisco and Entrust, and we have conducted trials at private
elections in 13 States and countries abroad. Last Tuesday,
hundreds and hundreds of people voted in our system, tried out
our system in Pennsylvania.
Your question, would the voting machine industry be able to
replace outdated machines by 2002, 2004. Our answer is
different than most. Remember we are offering software and our
partnership with Compaq allows for immediate scaleability. In
our case the necessary machines for a PC-based system are
already on the shelf and in production. Compaq offers us 27,000
technical people across America to help the election
administrators into this new system.
What could be done to improve certification? Remember, 5
years ago there was little or no national certification
process. I want to commend the National Association of Election
Directors. The trouble is that the technology wave is just
beginning. Software is the future, not hardware. Everything
offered from the panels today in many respects is obsolete or
will be obsolete within 3 to 5 years. Congress could help with
money for NASED's for independent testing to shorten the
process, and I would urge you to keep the bar high.
Question, how do we reduce the cost of equipment? Simple,
approve systems that use off-the-shelf hardware, reuse PCs for
other purposes in local jurisdictions. Scale is important and
so is competition. Offer systems where counties can buy PCs in
bulk. Give counties the option to lease equipment and upgrade.
Bring voting and bids to a cost per voter model. Our system
provides for this.
What can the Federal Government do to help? Keep the
attention focused on this issue, and you have done an excellent
job from the Chairmanship and the minority leadership. Solve
the military voting problem and solve it now. Today we have the
technology and the capability to conduct private, secure, fully
auditable on-line elections for the military serving overseas.
Americans need a better system. I am personally disgusted to
see how many military votes are tossed out.
Give the disabled the opportunity to vote with everyone
else and like everyone else. Listen to folks like Jim Dixon and
others who speak so well for disabled community. Keep the
voting standards high. Remember the three A's of election
administration: authentication, absolutely secret ballot, and
the audit process.
The solution to America's problem is not just money for
punch cards to be removed and optical scans to replace them.
Both of those systems are obsolete.
An assessment of Internet voting. I can't get through the
grocery store without people asking me about when do we go vote
on the Internet. Remember that this process will be evolution,
not revolution. Start with the military. Mr. Hoyer hit the nail
right in the head. Work with the disabled, and after that, the
PC voting systems are best prepared for evolution into Internet
technology.
So I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear.
The Chairman. Thank you very much.
Mr. Vadura.
STATEMENTS OF DENNIS VADURA
Mr. Vadura. Mr. Chairman I would like my testimony to be
made part of the record.
The Chairman. Without objection.
Mr. Vadura. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee,
thank you for letting us--I appreciate the opportunity to
appear here today and offer testimony on the very important
issue of election reform as it relates to voting and machine
technology.
With the November 7th, 2000 general election, the country
received a stark wake-up call regarding the status of its
voting technology. In considering potential remedies to what
quickly became a very visible problem, we at Web Tools
International discussed a number of alternative solutions,
including Internet-based voting. After all, we are an Internet
and information technology company, and Internet-based voting
would have been a clear fit for our core business.
However, early on we rejected Internet based voting as a
viable solution in the foreseeable future for a number of
reasons, not the least of which were the need for system
security and the need to maintain the integrity of the vote. We
therefore set out to retain the voter trust by designing an
accurate and reliable vote counting system that attempted to
embrace the best of both the new technology and the old tried-
and-true paper based systems. A key design goal of our system
was the belief that we should retain, as much as practical, the
context of the voter's current polling place experience while
enhancing it to take advantage of what a touch screen system
could provide, namely, a correct and auditable account.
The result is AccuPoll, WTI's polling place electronic
voting system, that guides the voter through the voting process
using a touch sensitive screen, allows the voter to review
their ballot for correctness, and provides the voter with a
paper ballot that contains their selections and which they
deposit in a ballot box in a manner similar to what they do
today. AccuPoll is designed to eliminate overvotes--they are
simply not allowed--and significantly reduce undervotes from
voter error. Together these serve to significantly reduce, if
not eliminate entirely, the possibility of inadvertent voter
error.
We maintain in AccuPoll an electronic record of all ballots
cast. The paper ballots produced by AccuPoll are both human and
machine readable. Thus the official paper ballots can be
audited against the electronic ballots stored by the system and
the electronic ballots can themselves be audited against the
paper ballots deposited by voters into ballot boxes. The cross-
audit of the paper ballot count against the electronic ballot
count serves to prevent the possibility of ballot counting
error, electronic tampering and paper ballot fraud. In the
event of a contest to the election results, the electronic
tally as well as the paper ballots can be quickly and
consistently audited to verify the election results.
In answering some of the questions that were posed to us, I
would like to say that can we replace the voting technology by
2002 or 2004, I think the answer there is depending on whether
we can use off-the-shelf technology. If the answer is yes, then
I think by 2004 we can certainly have the capacity in the PC
industry to move to an electronic-based system.
And in terms of what the government can do to improve the
certification process, I concur with my colleague here that I
think the software certification issue is going to be the most
important issue going forward. If we are going to eliminate
hardware as a hardware issue for certification by using off-
the-shelf components, then quickly moving to certify software
is really important, both for the new technology companies as
well as the old technology companies. We need to make the
changes quickly.
So I thank you for the opportunity to testify here today.
The Chairman. I want to thank the entire panel. I will be
very quick on my questions. I want to give Mr. Hoyer some time,
and if there is time left, I have got a ton more. How many of
you have been voter tested out in the field on a pilot? Okay,
you have and you have. Been pilot or you are actually voter
tested?
Mr. Strama. We have 170 counties using our voter
registration software. We also do private sector elections on
the Internet including for the Sierra Club, a lot of
nonprofits, trade associations and labor unions using remote
Internet voting which we think is sort of the proving ground
for the ability to eventually begin using it for limited
populations in public elections.
The Chairman. I think--on your machines, I think, Mr.
Minadeo, I think I had a receipt on yours, right?
Mr. Minadeo. Yes.
The Chairman. Let me ask anybody here, what about the
debate--and I have thought different directions on receipts--
the debate that leads to the potential, if you get the receipt,
to vote selling or some pressure there. It is always so private
how you voted.
Mr. Minadeo. Well, the one option is that the receipt only
says that you voted or did not vote for a particular office. So
there is no way to buy the vote per se. The model would be that
the, say the clerk's office would have a written record of the
votes and you would have to sign in saying you are checking
your receipt, you only get an opportunity to check one receipt
per person. So you can't come in with 1,000 receipts saying I
want to check them all for my whole family here or something
like that.
The Chairman. Question I had for Mr. Fairbairn was how
secure is phone voting?
Mr. Fairbairn. Phone voting is very secure from what we
have tested so far in regards to it has encryption technologies
already built into it. We utilize the Microsoft encryption API,
which is an industry standard, and in that standard we can also
run different type of algorithms as well as some types of
digital signatry.
The Chairman. Thank you. And the question I had for Mr.
Strama, you look taller on MTV than you do here today, I wanted
to tell you, on that Rock the Vote. You have a very interesting
background. I know you don't have voting machines. I want to
ask you a couple of questions. You had led the charge to have
the motor voter in Texas and were ahead of the Federal
Government in having it. Local boards of elections, either
political party, you know, come up to me a lot and at the
grocery store and they ask, you know, here is their dilemma. In
fact, Ms. Carolyn Jackson, I think her name was Carolyn,
testified here from Tennessee and she said, you know, people
come up to them because the DMV of that State doesn't have the
capability, can't, not intentional, transmit, so all of the
sudden she has to tell a voter you are not eligible, and then
there is lists that I get boards of elections, again both
political parties, that will say we have got to be able to get
some of these people off the lists that aren't here.
Now how is your system geared to help through some of the
glitches that happened in motor voter?
Mr. Strama. It is an excellent question because one of the
issues that was not paid as much attention to in the wake of
the past election were all the problems that were as
numerically significant as the tabulation problems with people
trying to vote and not being on the list, and people who voted
but maybe shouldn't have and people who inadvertently, in some
cases, voted twice.
The answer to your question, is our system was built in
Arkansas. What happened was the counties--after NVRA was
passed, the counties in Arkansas couldn't afford to comply with
the requirements of NVRA. It required a great deal more
computer technology and automation and reporting capabilities
than they had in place at the time. So the poorer counties just
couldn't implement it. So they went up to the Secretary of
State, Secretary Sharon Priest and said, you have got to help
us solve this problem because we can't comply with the Federal
law. Secretary Priest went to the legislature. The legislature
appropriated funds to build a uniform statewide system so that
the poor counties have the same quality technology as the
wealthier counties. Once you have a uniform system statewide,
it really improves the ability to transfer data, not just among
counties, to do duplicate checking among counties as was
mentioned before, but also to transfer data from the State
agencies that have now become voter registration agencies under
NVRA back to the counties.
So for example, when you register at a DMV in Arkansas, if
you get your address changed on your driver's license or you
get a new driver's license and they ask you if you want to
register to vote, you then sign a pad. If you do want to
register to vote, you then sign a pad that records the digital
image of your signature. The data is transmitted electronically
to the country.
The Chairman. Because right now when they go into register
in a lot of States, they sign and it never gets transmitted,
and then the local board of election official has to be the bad
person and say you can't vote.
Mr. Strama. That is exactly right. By networking the county
to a central statewide system for voter registration database
management, and then networking that system to the State
agencies that are now registering voters, you lose that risk of
data lost, and that is where the problems were.
The Chairman. Is your system foolproof on not having the
same person registered in two States? Can it catch that?
Mr. Strama. No unfortunately. It does eliminate the problem
of duplicate registrations among countries when you network
them State wide, but the only way to eliminate the problems of
duplicate registrations among States would be to create a
central national clearinghouse, and that is--I have talked to
some of your staff about that before and that has got some
political obstacles ahead of it.
The Chairman. Because of the time, I think Mr. Hoyer's
point about the youth and knowing your involvement and
background with youth, I think our community has a program like
this. I think that is a good way to be very excited about it,
and Rock the Vote, I thought, was a very interesting
undertaking.
Mr. Strama. Young people make excellent poll workers.
The Chairman. Last two quick questions. Military voting by
2002, I think----
Mr. Munro. I could comment on that. I think there are
several people here at the table.
The Chairman. Do you think you could do that?
Mr. Munro. Some of us at the table believe the technology
is here. The question that I have personally is the interest at
the high levels of the Pentagon enough that they will go ahead
and move ahead to implement a system. The current systems that
they talk about are really, really obsolete, and there are
opportunities ahead. Technology is flowing down much faster
than anyone realizes, and I think that this picture could
change dramatically, and we believe we have a system.
I heard another gentleman say that they believe they have a
system. Probably the place that Congress could help us most
would be to convince the higher levels of the Pentagon that
they need to look at this problem.
The Chairman. I think you register--you select people as
registrars. If you have 400 people together or 1,000 people
together, it is nothing unusual. You have X amount of
registrars that certify that the people are who they are, and
then they would have to, of course, use encryption because of
where it is coming from.
Mr. Munro. Encryption, digital signature, or some sort of a
Smart Card to pull up their ballot, and you could make this
happen.
The Chairman. My last question I had, and then I will yield
to Mr. Hoyer, I think Mr. Vadura raised it and Dr. Chaum, about
Internet voting. Now, why can't you use--because at first, when
you say Internet voting, all kinds of things come to my mind
about potential fraud and people are sitting there, but nothing
could be more sought after than people's money, and you know I
have PIN numbers, everybody has, and I don't recall huge
amounts of fraud in acquiring people's PIN numbers for their
ATM cards all over unless you give it out. Am I correct in
thinking you could think along a process of Internet voting
based on PIN numbers or is that hackable?
Mr. Vadura. The issue with Internet voting is not a
technology issue. I think you are absolutely right. We have all
the systems in place to make sure that the vote itself, the
content of the vote itself is securely transmitted between the
end user and the centralized storage location, server if you
will. The issue goes back to it is a social issue and back to
vote buying. How do you know that someone is not sitting with
that person in their office asking them to vote Democrat in
return for a chicken as I have often heard said, and I think
that is the primary issue. It is a political and social issue.
It is not a technology issue. It is a political and social
issue. It is a technology issue. Now for the military, I think
it is completely appropriate.
The Chairman. What about absentee ballots? I want to relate
them to paper for a minute, and believe me, I try to keep an
open mind. My first instinct is to say fraud, fraud, fraud, but
all of the sudden I think, well, what about absentee ballot.
Somebody could be sitting there saying to me how are you going
to fill that out because it is done in the privacy of my home.
Mr. Munro. 54 percent of the people in Washington State now
vote by mail. 100 percent of the people in Oregon vote by mail.
I was an elected official up to a few months ago. A lot of my
fellow elected officials didn't want to hear it, but Internet
voting is coming and it is coming quite fast.
The Chairman. I have got to tell you I was 100 percent
skeptical of it. I am not saying where I have evolved to
percentage-wise on it, but I start to compare it because it is
an electronic device. I am skeptical because I wasn't raised
with electronic devices. But yet I think okay well what about
absentee ballots. Somebody could be sitting there--it is a
piece of paper but they could be sitting there saying hey.
Mr. Chaum. Mr. Chairman, I would like to draw the
committee's attention to the fact that the Secretary of State
of California study and the recently-published NSF study, both
concluded that Internet voting wasn't viable because of the
problem that the PCs primarily could have viruses or whatever
in them that could cause the vote of the person to be changed,
and you might never be able to really figure out what happened
and so forth. This is a serious issue and that is why they
recommended that it not be done.
However, as you know from yesterday, our technology allows
PIN codes, as you mentioned, to be given to people on paper
instruments from government, and those PIN codes can then be
used to vote, one PIN code per candidate. With a system like
that, the whole Internet voting problem is solved in the sense
that it doesn't matter what any of the PCs or infrastructure
does because those PIN codes can be transferred over the
network just like a launch code for a missile. There is no way
for anyone in the network to change it to another valid code.
So in particular, also related to your question about
military voting, and we have heard about Smart Card solutions,
people want to put equipment in military bases, and your own
solution sounded very interesting, but it would be possible to
provide military with paper ballots for at least for Federal
elections, that then they could securely vote over phone or
Internet or what have you, because the medium that they use to
transfer a PIN code per candidate doesn't matter.
I think, and particularly with military elections, the
privacy of the vote is a real issue. In the past, the military
hasn't seen fit in many cases to really address that.
The Chairman. I think more of the military too is getting
the vote there on time.
Mr. Chaum. Certainly.
The Chairman. Mr. Hoyer.
Mr. Hoyer. I will be brief because our time is running out.
Is everybody in the panel agreed that on the priority of old
technology retirement? Said another way, which of the
technologies--I think I know the answer--do you think we ought
to get rid of first or is there?
Mr. Strama. Lever machines. Lever machines have up to a 10
percent error rate, as Secretary of State Kathy Cox has
identified in Georgia, and next would be punch cards, I think.
Mr. Chaum. If you look at the recent MIT CalTech studies on
this, it is surprising, but actually the DREs are coming up
with a pretty high error rate compared to a number of the more
favored based systems, and I noticed some of the congressmen
voting in the Expo yesterday having problem working the touch
screen machines. This is not really a panacea, I am afraid. So,
politically, obviously, punch card is something that has to be
replaced.
Mr. Munro. I would reply a little bit differently. I would
say, Mr. Hoyer, that whenever Congress approves, if there is
money or if there is stipulation, keep the bar very high. Keep
the bar high.
Mr. Hoyer. This is the standards issue?
Mr. Muno. Keep the standards high. Just because somebody
has a black box or a screen or something doesn't mean they have
a secure system. Make it as tough as possible because only the
best will meet that standard and that is what America deserves.
Mr. Minadeo. I would say also the lever technology would be
the first priority. Being in a country where they do use those
machines, the qualified personnel, even just to fix then, are
become being less and less, and the parts and the availability
to fix then, at least with any kind of paper ballot, it is not
a technology that hasn't gone away, but as far as New York
having problems with machines and New Jersey, that is probably
the biggest issue is just the repair and upkeep of such a
machine.
Mr. Fairbairn. My personal knowledge of exactly what
technology is out there is fairly limited, but in regards to
the disabled community, I would feel that it would probably be
better off to a evaluate the technology that is out there than
try to integrate newer solutions into that technology to allow
a more universal accessibility to the voter, and in doing do,
you could utilize that--we talked about speech recognition
engines or something like that to help provide a broader scope
of people with disabilities going to the poll and how you would
do that.
Mr. Hoyer. On disability access, does everybody agree that
that needs to be one of the important standards?
Mr. Vadura. Absolutely.
Mr. Hoyer. In the legislature I have introduced, as you
know, one of the things you would have to do is certify
compliance with disability access.
Mr. Chaum. I personally think that one could broaden the
definition of disability a little bit because there are very
elderly people and so on that aren't officially disabled. I
think when you see the demographics of poor turnout and
participation and accuracy in voting differs by age group and
so forth, so when you change the type of technology that is
used. So I think that, you know, this voting system question is
a very complex one, and what we need is really to test at the
user interface level as you heard, see what kind of systems
really in practice people do work with accurately and like and
so on, and all different kinds of age levels and ability
levels, and that is something that is not done by trials. That
is something that has to be done more in a laboratory type of
environment, really deliberately testing. That is the kind of
thing that is needed to get really a fair way for people to
input their votes.
Mr. Vadura. The other comment I would like to make is on
disability access. I think it is also feasible to think about
it in terms of does every voting system have to have the
disability access or should the legislation say that the
polling place must have disability access, and I think those
two aren't necessarily one in the same.
Mr. Hoyer. Combination standard which is the ADA standard,
I think, an access point per precinct compliant.
Mr. Vadura. That is right and it doesn't have to come from
the same vendor. That is what I am trying to say.
Mr. Hoyer. I understand what you are saying. I have heard
on Internet voting, I was surprised that Bob is moving the
other way--the Chairman is--that so many of the experts said
that Internet voting was not something that they think we ought
to move to very quickly. Again, I would stress that what Mr.
Ney and I are going to be doing is not choosing technologies
nor trying to impose technologies on States and subdivisions,
but in that context, do you believe that each State ought to
have uniform technology within a State, or do you think it
continues to be viable to have multiple technologies within
that State?
Mr. Vadura. My personal belief is that it is beneficial to
have uniform technology statewide if possible. It is a training
issue. It helps in training. It is a cost reduction issue. It
is a rollout issue. It is a maintenance issue. All of those, if
you have uniform technology, you can rely on resources--fewer
resources to maintain the equipment statewide. But that is a
harder thing to get to and will all recognize that, but I think
it will be better for the State electorate and the industry if
we could do that.
Mr. Munro. I would just respond and urge you, don't do
anything to limit technology because the technology is coming
very, very fast.
Mr. Hoyer. And in response to that, the legislation that I
am introducing, and I would think that Mr. Ney and I will be
introducing will not do that. I agree with you 100 percent. In
fact, I think we will want to try to encourage--as I said
earlier, you may have heard in term of dollars available for
RDT&E, for additional research into whether it is done through
a government agency or it is done by private sector or
partnership between the two. Clearly, I don't think any of us
think we are--we now have all the technology that needs to be
available.
Mr. Chaum. I would like to point out that I think that that
technology research money would be far better spent a priori
trying to get a kind of generally-agreed technology solutions
for voting that are vetted by the real experts in the Federal
government that then could roll out in massive way as opposed
to, and then you could get big companies behind. If you just
start producing the market opportunity by funding the
deployment of all kinds of existing stuff, then big companies
aren't going to want to get into it, and if you start giving
away research money it is really not going to go anywhere.
Whereas if you do the research first, then the market
opportunity to capture the whole market is huge. Big players
can come in and you can get a real national level of technology
options available, that then can be rolled out in a very
expeditious way. And so I don't think the question is really
which machine should we replace further, but rather how can we
quickly find out what are the best voting technology complete
suggestions available, and then get Federal guidelines to give
criteria that would incorporate those so that we can just roll
out and uniformize the voting in this country.
Mr. Hoyer. Toward that end, one of the things that I tried
to do in the legislation I have introduced is centralize the
administration, what is now the Office of Election
Administration, which is in FEC, and move that into an
independent commission, four people on it, bipartisan, with
dollars available to them, for the purposes of approaching what
you are suggesting in term of getting and almost, as everybody
has testified to in terms of national recommended objectives,
standards, call them what you will, keeping the bar high, what
works, et cetera.
Mr. Chairman, I have got a lot of other questions but the
hour is late. Folks have been waiting a long time. I think this
has been very useful and we are going to have a lot of work.
The chairman and I are going to be working very hard over the
next number of days to try to come up with legislation which
will give broad parameters and encouragement and assistance to
the States and local subdivisions to accomplish many of the
objectives, but it is clear that we need to provide a system
which will--and one of the things I didn't ask this panel, I
asked the last panel, was in terms of provisional balloting.
Registration obviously is a big problem, centralization of
registration. Provisional balloting for those that say they are
properly registered, but for whatever reasons, technically we
can't grab that information at the time, clearly very
important, and huge issues is going to be, I know what kind of
identification and fraud prevention procedures are involved,
which you may or may not have some thoughts on. But we are
going to be trying to get legislation to the floor hopefully in
the near term, so that notwithstanding the thought, that we now
have revolutionary, but evolutionary change, I think that is a
good suggestion. I think that serves us by not mandating the
technology, but allowing the States and not only allowing the
States, but the States have that right to provide for different
kinds of uses of technology, and see what works better than
others, or the greater experiences we have, the better results
I think ultimately we will get.
But whether we are fully implemented in 2002, I think we
need to make a very substantial step towards obviously doing
away with technology that is no longer serviceable and parts
aren't available on lever machines and which have a high error
rate, which people don't really get because they think once you
pull down that lever the tumbler will work absolutely
correctly, the vote will count, et cetera, and it doesn't and
we know it doesn't.
And in addition we know that the punch card system
obviously has a high degree of error and the higher degree or
the more centralized accounting system, the higher degree of
error. If you have a precinct-based system, you have less error
because voters can come back.
I appreciate your taking the time. Look forward to working
with you Mr. Chairman. Thank you again for your leadership on
this issue.
The Chairman. I too want to thank the witness, and again, I
want to make it clear, I am very skeptical of the Internet, but
I guess my point, too, is that, just to beat the Internet dead
horse again, but I think there is a balance here, and you want
to write some standards, but you want to have an open mind and
flexibility to it. So I appreciate working with Mr. Hoyer.
I want to again thank you for coming to the Capitol. It has
been, believe me, a tremendous help and I ask unanimous consent
that witnesses be allowed to submit their statements for the
record, and for those statements to be entered in the
appropriate place in the record. Without objection, material
will be so entered.
I ask unanimous consent the staff be authorized to make
technical and conforming changes on all matters considered by
the committee at today's hearing. Without objection so ordered.
Having completed our business for today and for this hearing--
--
Mr. Hoyer. Can I make just one comment before we end?
The Chairman. Sure.
Mr. Hoyer. This has been, I think, a very, very important
hearing because the technical aspects of this are obviously
very important. We need to I think reiterate that the major
problem that we want to make sure is that whatever the
technology that we make sure that voters are facilitated in
coming to the polls, casting their vote, having it accurately
counted, which is the technology component, but this is a
broader issue than just technology, but technology is going to
be, I think, a very, very important part of the solution. Thank
you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you. The committee is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:30 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]