[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 141 (Wednesday, October 8, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9357-H9358]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    THE NEED FOR RELIABLE, ACCESSIBLE, AND VERIFIABLE VOTING METHODS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Holt) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to follow my friend, the 
gentleman

[[Page H9358]]

from Washington (Mr. McDermott). And to think that the gentleman got in 
some hot water not too many months ago for saying that, well, he might 
question the veracity of some in the administration who were talking 
about the facts leading us to war. I think the American people have 
come to see that the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) knew 
what he was talking about.
  But I would like to talk about another subject: voting, the single 
most important act of a democratic republic.
  Now, citizens in my State of New Jersey tell me they want voting 
techniques, technologies that are reliable, accessible, and verifiable. 
And they are concerned that in the stampede to replace the unreliable 
butterfly and punch card ballots, that we may be replacing one 
unreliable voting technology with another.
  Now, consider electronic machines like, for example, touch-screen 
machines. They are convenient, they are accessible, they are fast and 
efficient. In many ways, they make good voting machines. They report 
the election results promptly and can reduce clerical errors and errors 
in addition. And certainly Members of Congress, I for one, have 
encountered in an election where the county clerk makes errors of 
addition that, in some cases, take hours and, in other cases, days to 
uncover. But these electronic machines are good, except that they are 
inherently unverifiable. Voters ask me, now, after I vote on an 
electronic machine, how will I know that back there in the electronics, 
back in the ether, back in cyberspace, the vote was recorded as I 
intended. The answer is, they do not know. They cannot know. Because of 
software or hardware errors, the votes might have been misrecorded. 
Innocent, accidental errors, or malicious, intentional, hacking errors. 
The real problem is that there is no way for the voter to verify the 
reliability of the electronic count.
  Voters are plenty skeptical these days, and we cannot afford to have 
voters more skeptical about the process that they are supposed to own.
  Mr. Speaker, I have introduced legislation under which each voter 
gets to see a printed record of his or her vote to verify that the vote 
is recorded as the voter intended and that the printed record becomes 
the vote of record. Now, this gives all the convenience, accessibility, 
and reliability of the electronic voting machines. And, it gives the 
added element of verifiability, of verification that belongs to each 
voter, as it should.

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