[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 155 (Friday, December 15, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2227-E2228]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E2227]]
  MIT AND CALTECH JOIN FORCES TO LAUNCH ELECTION TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVE

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, December 15, 2000

  Mr. DELAHUNT. Mr. Speaker, as the dust settles over the presidential 
election of 2000, I hope we will treat our recent experience as an 
opportunity to adopt long overdue reforms in the way we run our Federal 
elections. I hope we will enlist our best minds in the effort to 
develop better systems and procedures that will restore public 
confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the electoral process.
  In this regard, I want to call to the attention of my colleagues an 
initiative launched just yesterday by the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology and Caltech, to develop a new voting machine that will be 
easy to use, reliable, secure and affordable.
  With an initial grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the venture will 
bring together a team of leading experts in technology, design, and 
political science to develop technological solutions to the problems 
that have occurred not only in Florida but throughout the country.
  This is a very promising development, Mr. Speaker, and I hope we will 
do all we can to foster such private sector initiatives. But we must 
also be sure that State and local election officials have the 
wherewithal to take advantage of new technologies. That is why when the 
107th Congress convenes in January, I will join with Congressman Graham 
and a number of our colleagues in introducing bipartisan legislation to 
ensure the accuracy, integrity, and efficiency of future Federal 
elections.
  The ``Federal Election Standards Act'' would establish a National 
Advisory Commission on Federal Election Standards to study the 
accuracy, integrity, and efficiency of Federal election procedures and 
develop standards of best practice for the conduct of Federal 
elections. The commission would have one year to complete its work.
  Once the commission has issued its report, the bill would authorize 
Federal grants and technical assistance to States that wish to adopt 
measures for reform of their election procedures in a manner consistent 
with the standards.
  The Act would not mandate changes in State practices, nor would it 
federalize election procedures. Rather, it would encourage State 
election officials to upgrade and modernize their election systems by 
establishing benchmarks for the conduct of Federal elections and 
providing the States with the resources needed to meet them.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope that the next congress will take prompt action on 
this legislation, so that the most advanced nation on earth will have 
an electoral system that is up to the task.

                           [MIT News Office]

MIT, Caltech Join Forces to Develop Reliable, Uniform US Voting Machine

                          (By Sarah H. Wright)

       Cambridge, MA, Dec. 14.--The presidents of MIT and Caltech 
     have announced a collaborative project to develop an easy-to-
     use, reliable, affordable and secure United States voting 
     machine that will prevent a recurrence of the problems that 
     threatened the 2000 presidential election. The announcement 
     was made in a joint video news conferences at MIT and Caltech 
     on Thursday. ``It is embarrassing to America when technology 
     fails and puts democracy to such a test as it did this 
     month,'' said Caltech President David Baltimore, who opened 
     the hour-long live teleconference in Pasadena, California. 
     ``Academic institutions have a responsibility to help repair 
     the voting process so that we don't see anything like this 
     again. This project is intended to protect the system from 
     the problems we've seen in the last election,'' Dr. Baltimore 
     said.
       MIT President Charles M. Vest, speaking from Cambridge, 
     echoed Dr. Baltimore's concern for the security and 
     credibility of the voting process. ``We must find a solution. 
     Each of us must be confident that his or her vote has been 
     reliably recorded and counted. A country that has put a man 
     on the moon and an ATM machine on every corner has no 
     excuse,'' said Dr. Vest. ``America needs a uniform balloting 
     procedure. This has become painfully obvious in the current 
     national election, but the issue is deeper and broader than 
     one series of events,'' said Vest and Baltimore in a Dec. 12 
     letter to President Vartan Gregorian of Carnegie Corporation 
     of New York.
       Gregorian said, ``I want to congratulate the two presidents 
     of our nation's most distinguished universities for their 
     leadership in this welcome and timely initiative on behalf of 
     our election system. Voting is the fundamental safeguard of 
     our democracy and we have the technological power to ensure 
     that every person's vote does count. MIT and Caltech have 
     assembled a team of America's top technology and political 
     science scholars to deal with an issue no voter wants 
     ignored. This research is certain to ensure that America's 
     voting process is strengthened-'' Gregorian said he will 
     recommend the Carnegie Corporation board fund the $250,000 
     initial phase of the research.
       The grant will used by a team of two professors from each 
     university who are experts in technology, design and 
     political science. The four members of the team are 
     Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professors Stephen 
     Ansolabehere of political science and Nicholas Negroponte, 
     chairman of the MIT Media Lab; and Caltech Professors Thomas 
     Palfrey of political science and economics and Jehoshua Bruck 
     of computation and neural systems and electrical engineering.


                            LESSEN CONFUSION

       Professor Ansolabehere, speaking at the teleconference, 
     said, ``We are going to consider voting technologies from the 
     paper ballots of the nineteenth century to the latest. First, 
     we'll look, literally, at what people do in the voting booth. 
     There, our goal is to lower voter confusion. ``Second, we'll 
     look at how votes are counted, comparing the precinct level 
     to a central counting agency. We will look at the strengths 
     and weaknesses of voting technologies, find the greatest 
     weakness and work from there. Our goal is to find the most 
     reliable among existing technologies.'' The first phase of 
     the joint project--surveying existing technologies and 
     setting up criteria--would be complete in about six months, 
     Professor Ansolabehere added.
       Professor Palfrey of Caltech noted there were ``issues that 
     didn't hit the press in Florida but that are critical, 
     including comparing the cost of existing technologies to the 
     cost of standardization and modernization, which could run 
     into several billions of dollars. ``But compare that one-time 
     cost to the $300 billion annual defense budget. It's a small 
     price to pay for modernizing democracy,'' he said. Professor 
     Palfrey also noted other issues for the MIT-Caltech team to 
     explore, such as the impact of the current system of election 
     administration, which is ``highly decentralized and 
     fragmented,'' and the role of absentee voting, with its 
     implied concerns of security, liability, privacy, maintenance 
     and software development.


                                FEEDBACK

       Professor Negroponte, chairman of the MIT Media Lab, spoke 
     to his bi-coastal colleagues and the media about the actual 
     interface between people and any voting machine. ``Whatever 
     is invented will include some interface with machines, 
     whether we vote by computer, paper or in a voting booth. The 
     Media Lab intends to make that interface as easy as 
     possible,'' he said.
       Professor Negroponte outlined the goals of the joint 
     project from the perspective of design and feedback by 
     comparing the act of voting with the act of pushing a button 
     to summon an elevator. ``Right now, there's no feedback at 
     all in voting. You push the button. Nothing happens. It's 
     like when you push the elevator button and nothing happens: 
     you don't know if the elevator is broken or the light is 
     broken. It would be good to have some degree of feedback in 
     voting. For example, you might get some feedback saying, 'you 
     voted for x,'''he noted.


                             ATM THE MODEL

       The MIT-Caltech faculty team took a generally lighthearted 
     view of the alleged challenges to the public of mastering new 
     voting technology, despite months of. media attention to 
     voter confusion over the various forms of ballots and punch-
     card machines that didn't punch. ``Beware of the assumption 
     that newer technology is more complicated. The trend is the 
     opposite,'' said Dr. Vest. ``Most people have been able to 
     figure out ATMS. That's our model,'' remarked Dr. Baltimore.
       Vest and Baltimore said the new technology ``should 
     minimize the possibility of confusion about how to vote, and 
     offer clear verification of what vote is to be recorded. It 
     should decrease to near zero the probability of miscounting 
     votes... The voting technology should be tamper-resistant and 
     should minimize the prospect of manipulation and fraud.'' The 
     two university presidents proposed that their institutions 
     give the project high priority for two major reasons:
       ``First, the technologies in wide use today are 
     unacceptably unreliable. This manifests itself in at least 
     three forms: undercounts (failure to correctly record a 
     choice of candidate), overcounts (voting for two candidates), 
     and missed ballots (machine failure or feeding error). Punch 
     cards and optically scanned ballots are two of the most 
     widely used technologies, and both suffer unacceptably high 
     error rates in all three categories. For example, in the 
     recent Florida election, optical scanning technology had an 
     undercount rate of approximately 3 out of 1,000, and the 
     punch card undercount rate was approximately 15 out of 1,000. 
     Including the other two sources of errors, the overall ballot 
     failure rate with machine counting was about three times 
     this.
       ``Second, some of the most common types of machinery date 
     from the late nineteenth century and have become obsolete. 
     Most notably, many models of lever machines are no longer 
     manufactured, and although spare parts are difficult to 
     obtain, they are still widely used (accounting for roughly 15 
     percent of all ballots cast).


                        REPLACING LEVER MACHINES

       ``States and municipalities using lever machines will have 
     to replace them in the near future, and the two most common 
     alternatives are punch cards and optical scanning devices. 
     Ironically, many localities in Massachusetts have recently 
     opted for lever machines over punch card ballots because of

[[Page E2228]]

     problems with punch cards registering preferences.''
       Asked to comment on the project as scientists, both 
     university presidents noted the convergence of history and 
     technology as being especially promising for the development 
     of a new voting machine. ``This is a project we could have 
     tackled any time, but the truly bizarre circumstances of the 
     recent presidential election put it on the front burner. We 
     are also at a technological point where a solution is highly 
     likely,'' said Dr. Vest. ``There are times when events 
     overtake us. This is a good time and a necessary time to be 
     doing this,'' said Dr. Baltimore.
       The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the 
     California Institute of Technology have a relationship dating 
     back to 1920 when MIT scientists' helped shape the chemistry 
     and physics departments of the new California Institute of 
     Technology. Dr. Baltimore, a 1975 Nobel laureate, served on 
     the MIT faculty from 1968-90 and 1994-1997, when he was 
     appointed president of Caltech.

     

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