[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 147 (Monday, October 20, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H9713-H9716]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
2004 ELECTIONS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, this evening I wish to talk about the
elections of 2004 and how we prepare for them across our country, and I
wish to attach an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer today
entitled, ``Computer Voting Is Not Fool-proof'' and also a front-page
story from the New York Times entitled ``Replacement Near, Old Vote
Machines Are New York Issue.''
[From the Cleveland (OH) Plain Dealer, Oct. 2003]
Computer Voting Isn't Fool-Proof
(By Lawrence M. Krauss)
Anyone who was not in a coma in November 2000 remembers the
agony caused by the now infamous butterfly ballots and
hanging chads. Concerns about the possible repeat of events
almost caused the California recall election to be delayed.
Following the election debacle in Florida, Congress became
determined that in the next elections the winners actually
would be determined by all the votes casts. Last October,
they passed the Help America Vote Act in order to help states
prepare for the next election. Unfortunately, the solutions
being proposed, involving an assortment of computer-voting
systems, may be worse than the problems they were designated
to fix.
We are used to depending on computers for almost every
aspect of our lives, from governing our bank accounts to
controlling our cars. So it doesn't seem highly radical to
suggest computer-aided voting. That is, until you think of
the possible problems.
How can you be assured after you vote that the machine
actually recorded your vote? With a paper ballot, even a
flawed ballot, at least there is a semi-permanent record that
we can return to--and argue over, if necessary. Would you buy
an airplane ticket by computer if there was no way to obtain
a printed receipt of your transaction?
There already have been problems. For example, in the 2002
election, the new computer voting systems in Florida lost
more then 100,000 votes due to a software error.
Voting is not like a physics experiment. We learned in
Florida that even if the first attempt is flawed, no large-
scale election is likely to be repeated merely to verify the
result--as one would do in any good scientific measurement.
Thus, you have to get it right the first time and allow some
method of secure verification.
It is not surprising, therefore, that one of two Ph.D.
scientists in Congress, physicist Rush Holt of New Jersey,
has proposed new legislation that would require a paper
record of every vote and require that all software for use in
elections be verified in advance.
In spite of this, various states have indicated a
willingness to go ahead with systems that experts in the
field find suspect. As reported in the New York Times last
month, software flaws in a popular voting machine, the
Diebold Accuvote-TS machine, make it vulnerable to
manipulation. More than 33,000 of these machines are used in
38 states.
In the Science Applications International Corporation
report, commissioned by Maryland (which nevertheless plans to
use the Diebold machines in its next election), ``several
high risk vulnerabilities'' were identified--even based on
the assumption that the machines are isolated and not
connected to the Internet. But in a March primary in
California, the Diebold machines were connected to the
Internet with election tallies posted on the Internet before
polls closed.
It is interesting in this regard that Walden O'Dell, the
CEO of Diebold, an Ohio company, was quoted in The Plain
Dealer as telling Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter
that he is ``committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year.''
As we rush to install computer voting systems, we should
remember the admonition of a former chief scientist at Sun
Microsystems Inc., who said in a television interview
following the 2000 election: ``If your life depended on the
measurement of a single ballot, would you prefer it be read
by a machine, or examined carefully by three different human
beings?''
If we are to avoid a host of articles on this page
explaining how the election of 2004 might have been stolen,
state governments must step back from the current headlong
rush to install computer-voting system until the necessary
verification systems and security guarantees, certified by
outside experts, are in place. Certainly no one wants to
relieve the frustration that followed the 2000 election--
without any possibility of rechecking the results.
____
[From the New York Times, Oct. 20, 2003]
Replacement Near, Old Vote Machines Are New York Issue
(By Eric Lipton)
James Parks, on his knees, struggled to find the one screw
amid the 20,000 parts that would unjam the scraped and dented
New York City voting machine he was repairing. Ray Crews,
another mechanic, had a handful of thin metal straps, which
he carefully threaded, one at a time, into the back of the
800-pound behemoth he was servicing nearby. And Jamie Wilkins
used a screwdriver to flip back tiny copper switches in the
endlessly complex guts of another battleship-gray machine.
Almost three years have passed since the Election Day
debacle in Florida that generated calls for a comprehensive
nationwide modernization in voting equipment. But this
cavernous Brooklyn warehouse, filled with row after row of
mechanical lever voting machines, purchased mostly when John
F. Kennedy was in the Oval Office, shows just how far New
York City has to go.
``It's sticking,'' Mr. Parks finally yelled out to Mr.
Crews, a more experienced mechanic, as he tried to reset a
vintage Shoup voting machine so it could be used in the Nov.
4 election. ``I am trying to get to the screw. But I can't
get to it.''
New York State has a plan to buy new voting equipment,
replacing New York City's 7,295 machines as well as the
12,000 similarly antiquated machines elsewhere in the state.
The federal government has already delivered $65 million in
aid to New York to get this modernization project under way,
and up to $180 million more could ultimately come from
Washington.
Though New York City's voting machines broke down 603 times
in the 2002 primary and general elections, forcing thousands
to vote by paper ballot, not a cent of the federal funds has
been spent in New York State so far. And as each month
passes, it is looking increasingly uncertain that the state
will comply with a federal requirement that all the lever
machines be retired by 2006.
``It is a very tight schedule, even without delay,'' said
Lee Daghlian, a spokesman for the New York State Board of
Elections. ``It is going to be very difficult to do. And if
we don't meet the deadlines, we are in violation of the
law.''
The federal government has the right to sue states that
fail to comply, and to withhold aid.
Many other states are also struggling with voting
modernization, with just a few, like Georgia and Maryland,
already installing or selecting new machines statewide. Just
why New York is off to a slow start comes back, at least in
part, to that perennial source of roadblocks: partisan-
charged squabbling among the Senate, the Assembly and Gov.
George E. Pataki in Albany. But in this case, it is more
complicated.
A long list of fundamental questions must be answered about
how best to remake the voting experience across New York
State: what the new ballot should look like, how a new
statewide voter registration database should be set up, what
kind of security should be incorporated into the new
machines to prevent fraud, whether there should be one
machine statewide or several models, and who should select
the machines the state will buy.
Resolving each question will be hard enough. But the
choices must come amid the charged atmosphere sure to form as
lobbyists from the nation's biggest manufacturers of voting
equipment descend on Albany, trying to grab a piece of what
could be one of the largest voting machine contracts in the
nation's history.
``This is going to be intense,'' said Brian O'Dwyer, a
Democratic Party activist and a lobbyist for Sequoia Voting
Systems. Sequoia, a California company, has also hired a
Republican lobbying team, led by Jeff Buley, who was general
counsel to Governor Pataki's re-election campaign last year.
``It is huge,'' added Dan McGinnis, senior vice president
for domestic sales at Election System & Software, an Omaha,
Neb., company that wants into the New York market.
Regardless of who wins the contract, voters will see the
biggest changes in nearly a century. So a small army of
government watchdog types is monitoring the debate, ready to
intervene if politics intrudes on one of democracy's
fundamental rights.
``How you run your election is a cornerstone of
democracy,'' said Blair Horner, legislative director for the
New York Public Interest Research Group. ``We are very
concerned that a voting system may be put into
[[Page H9714]]
place that is less voter-friendly than the one we have right
now.''
Partisan Disputes
President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act into law in
October 2002. From the moment New York began to try to
comply, polities intervened.
When Governor Pataki set up a task force to draft a plan
detailing how New York would spend its cut of the expected
$3.7 billion in federal funds, he passed over Thomas R.
Wilkey, the executive director of the State Board of
Elections, a Democrat, and instead named the deputy director,
Peter S. Kosinski, a Republican, as the task force's
chairman. Mr. Kosinski then filled most of the task force's
other 19 seats with members of the Pataki administration or
other Republicans. Mr. Wilkey has since retired from the
agency.
Groups like Common Cause/New York and New York Immigration
Coalition had requested that the task force include disabled
people, young voters and members of ethnic minorities.
Unhappy with the result, critics accused the Pataki
administration of trying to hijack the election modernization
effort to benefit his party.
``From the start this process has been flawed, absolutely
flawed,'' said Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright of Manhattan,
chairman of the Assembly's Election Law Committee and one of
the Democrats on to the task force. ``And I will blame the
governor.''
Mr. Daghlian, the Board of Elections spokesman, said it
should come as no surprise that a Republican governor created
a Republican-dominated task force. He said Gov. Mario M.
Cuomo, a Democrat, did the same thing the last time there
were federally mandated changes in state election law. Now
the Democrats, he said, ``do not control this process'' and
are ``moaning about not being in the loop.''
The quarreling has implications for voters. One of the
first federal requirements is to create a unified database of
registered voters, to eliminate duplication and possible
fraud that result from each county keeping its own tally. A
2004 deadline was set; already, New York has asked for a
waiver until 2006.
Mr. Pataki had put $3 million in his budget plan for this
year to start on the task, which is expected to cost $20
million. But the Assembly struck that money when it adopted,
with the Senate, its own budget this year.
``Until there is an understanding that this is a bipartisan
operation, the money coming loose will not happen right
away,'' said Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., a Manhattan
Democrat who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and
of the state Democratic Party.
Joseph E. Conway, a spokesman for Mr. Pataki, said the
governor was committed to moving expeditiously and fairly
toward modernizing the election system. ``These criticisms
are just the same old tired partisan politics. New Yorkers
know that the governor has worked to bring bipartisan
cooperation to our election process.''
Before the state can even start to buy new election
machines, a fundamental question must also be answered about
their design. New York is one of only two states that require
a so-called full-faced ballot, which means that all the races
and candidates, as well as any ballot questions, can be seen
at once by voters. Party loyalists can easily flip switches
down the line from race to race.
The mechanical lever machines were designed to accommodate
large ballots. But most of the modern touch-screen voting
devices, which resemble automated teller machines, cannot.
They are set up so that a voter can scroll through one
contest at a time. Advocates for disabled people prefer the
scrolling machines, as they are smaller and easier for a
person in a wheelchair to use.
New York State officials have not taken a final stand on
the issue. But sides are forming. C. Virginia Fields, the
Manhattan borough president, and State Senator Liz Krueger,
both Democrats who have issued reports on the election
modernization effort, each concluded that the state should
abandon the full-face ballot requirement, citing the
disadvantages it will create for disabled people. They also
said it limited the options of manufacturers.
Some Republican leaders, meanwhile, say they want to keep
the law as it is. ``I think people ought to be able to see
everything that is going on at one time instead of flipping
menus,'' said State Senator Thomas P. Morahan, a Rockland
County Republican and the chairman of the Senate Elections
Committee. ``I don't believe I would be able to get a bill
out of the Senate on changing the full-face ballot.''
That is only the start of the unresolved questions that may
turn into partisan disputes. The Assembly, as well as the
Election Commissioners' Association of the State of New York
and the New York Public Interest Research Group, has pressed
to have a single new machine statewide, arguing it would make
maintenance and training easier and be better for voters who
move within the state.
But Mr. Kosinski, whom Mr. Pataki has hinted he would like
to see named permanent executive director of the Board of
Elections, said he thought the state should simply certify
the electronic machines that meet state and federal
requirements and then leave it up to the local governments to
pick the one they want. ``New York has always had a
decentralized system of elections'' he said.
The list of politically charged issues goes on and on. The
new federal law, for example, requires that certain voters
who have registered by mail present identification when
they show up at the polls for the first time. Democrats,
who have almost twice as many registered voters in New
York State as Republicans, want an expansive list of
acceptable forms of identification, including college
identification cards and public housing rent statements.
``If you have too strict adherence to identification
procedures, it could lead to possible disenfranchisement and
suppression of votes, especially in communities of color,''
Assemblyman Wright said. ``In the history of the United
States, this has happened many times before, and I have seen
it happen in New York.''
Working through these and other sensitive issues, such as
ensuring that the machines are essentially fraud-proof and
tamper-proof, will not be easy, some critics said. Though Mr.
Pataki's task force produced a report that is supposed to be
a framework for moving forward, it offers few solutions, they
said. ``The state plan succeeds only in putting off or
pushing down to the staff or county level the critical
decisions that must be mad,'' said Jeremy Creelan, associate
counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York
University School of Law, a voting rights and election reform
group. ``The process, from the beginning, has been a sham.''
A Century of Controversies
In a way, it should come as no surprise to New Yorkers that
a voting machine contract would generate controversy. Since
the first mechanical voting machine was introduced in the
United States--in 1892, when an upstate New York inventor
named Jacob H. Myers turned his fascination with bank vaults
into the ``automatic ballot cabinet''--acquiring the machines
for New York has been a touchy process.
Buffalo and Rochester moved to adopt the machines early on,
buying into promises that they would ``protect mechanically
the voter from rascaldom, and make the process of casting the
ballot perfectly plain, simple and secret.'' But New York
City fought an order by the state in 1925 that it abandon
pencil-marked ballots for the supposedly more efficient
machines.
``I can see the day when good Americans can sit motionless
in their chairs and live without touching anything,''
complained John R. Voorhis, then president of the city Board
of Elections, after the city backed down and finally
purchased its first complete set of election machines.
When New York City moved to buy a second generation of
machines in 1962, a lawsuit nearly blocked the purchase, this
time with claims that the contracting process had been
corrupted.
Pressure started to build on the city to replace its
1960's-era machines after the 1984 presidential primary, as
supporters of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first major black
presidential candidate, charged that there had been too many
machine breakdowns in predominantly black neighborhoods.
But even before the city had awarded a contract for
computerized voting machines, there was controversy, with one
lobbyist claiming he had been asked for a bribe and a secret
city report on the contest turning up in the hands of one of
the bidders. Ultimately, the city spent at least $4.5 million
on consultants and other costs, but the machines never
arrived, partly because a contractor could not deliver vote-
counting software that satisfied the city.
Though neither a mechanism for awarding a contract nor
specifications for an acceptable voting terminal have been
agreed to yet, lobbyists for manufacturers have been gearing
up.
The most aggressive campaign has come from Sequoia Voting
Systems, which won the New York City contract in the 1990's
but was never allowed to deliver on it.
To pitch to Republican lawmakers in Albany, Sequoia has
hired Mr. Buley, a legal consultant to the New York State
Republican Committee and a counsel to Governor Pataki's 2002
campaign, at $7,500 a month. Mr. Buley said he has met with
staff members from the offices of Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate
majority leader, and Senator Morahan, the Elections Committee
chairman, among others.
Sequoia also has a Democratic lobbying firm, the law firm
O'Dwyer & Bernstien, which is earning $10,000 a month. When
that firm learned that Assemblyman Farrell had concerns about
whether elderly voters would be able to adjust to
computerized voting machines, a Sequoia machine was brought
in and a demonstration was organized for Mr. Farrell's staff
at a Washington Heights restaurant in northern Manhattan.
Elderly voters were recruited from local community centers,
with an offer of a free lunch. A bus was chartered. And for
about $4,000, Sequoia's lobbyists delivered a litany of
testimonials about how easy the Sequoia machine was to use.
``This won't be too hard,'' said Mary Frances Howard, 76, a
regular at the Wilson Major Morris Community Center at 152nd
Street and Amsterdam Avenue, which sent about a dozen
volunteers to the demonstration and free lunch in June. ``It
is easy.''
Mr. O'Dwyer said the event was a success. ``He is very
important,'' Mr. O'Dwyer said of Mr. Farrell, who sent his
chief of staff to the event. ``His concerns have to be our
concerns.''
[[Page H9715]]
Because of Sequoia's aggressive early lobbying, some call
it the front-runner for the contract. ``There is an
undercurrent up here in Albany that says Sequoia is a lock,''
said Assemblyman Wright. ``I think it is horrible.''
But Sequoia is not the only firm going the lobbying route.
Diebold Election Systems, based in McKinney, Tex., and known
mostly for its A.T.M.'s, is spending $12,500 a month to
retain Greenberg Traurig, a Manhattan law firm. Greenberg's
lobbyists are Robert Harding, former deputy mayor under
Rudolph W. Giuliani, and John Mascialino, a lawyer and former
first deputy commissioner of a city agency charged with
buying equipment and supplies under Mr. Giuliani.
Election Systems & Software pays Davidoff & Malito, one of
the state's biggest lobbying firms, $10,000 a month. Its
senior partners, Sid Davidoff and Robert Malito, are former
aides to Mayor John V. Lindsay.
Liberty Election Systems, a new outfit owned by the
executives of an Albany printing company that has produced
election ballots for decades, is spending $3,000 a month on
lobbyists from Capitol Group.
Mr. Daghlian of the State Board of Elections said that
regardless of any lobbying pitch, no preference would be
shown in evaluating voting machines. ``There will be no
sweetheart contracts with anybody,'' he said.
parts by the thousands
John P. O'Grady, New York City's chief voting machine
technician, was hired by the city Board of Elections to help
oversee the addition of computerized voting machines when his
daughter was 1 year old. Today, Megan, the daughter, is 12.
The city still has not installed its first computerized
machine.
``I can't wait to see them, I just can't wait to see
them,'' he said. ``I know it has to come, and the mechanical
machines have served the city well, but the city and its
voters deserve a more modern machine.''
Until that happens, he spends his days leading a crew of 65
full-time mechanics who work out of warehouses like the one
at 645 Clinton Street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. In
just this one warehouse, 2,200 machines are stored, each with
dents and other marks that attest to decades' worth of city
service.
Keeping them running is not easy, as all the knobs,
springs, straps, gears, cogs, rollers, screws, counters and
green, cherry, yellow and white light bulbs must be
constantly checked and rechecked. ``Wear and tear will break
you down,'' said Jamie Wilkins, 44, a machine technician from
International Election Systems, a New Jersey contractor hired
by the city to repair and prepare the machines for elections.
Yet even with weeks of effort by Mr. O'Grady's army of
mechanics, the Shoup machines are breaking down too often, he
concedes. In the November 2000 election, the last
presidential contest, 412 machines broke down citywide for an
average of 45 minutes to an hour each. As a result, 20,717
voters had to use emergency paper ballots, leading to lines
so long that some voters gave up. Last November, when turnout
was lighter, there were still 358 breakdowns among the 6,788
machines in use.
The city at least has a sufficient supply of backup parts,
like the thousands of extra black metal levers at the
Brooklyn warehouse. Far from the good of beginning a phase-in
of new machines by 2004, it will have to do for now.
``Let's get this thing done,'' said John Ravitz, executive
director of the New York City Board of Elections, a
Republican who is also a former member of the State Assembly.
``Let's settle the differences in Albany and give us the
opportunity to bring a modern system to the voters of New
York.''
Anyone who was not in a coma last November 2000 remembers the
election debacle in Florida. Still today, thousands of votes remain
uncounted. Congress, as a result, passed the Help America Vote Act in
October of last year, and we provided at least language that directed
the Bush administration to give funds to the States to buy new machines
and also to help educate voters how to use this new equipment and to
provide standards at the Federal level, so that local officials buying
this equipment would know what they were doing and the machines that
they were buying would be both secure and easily accessible to the
voters. The problem is it is not happening, and we are facing the
election of 2004.
The law HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, does not require any board
of elections to purchase equipment by a year from next month, November.
That can wait until 2006. I have been surprised at the confusion that
exists across our country regarding the requirements of HAVA. States
are afraid the Federal Government is going to fine them, but the
Federal Government has not kept its word. It has not given the States
the money that it needs because the Bush administration is not asking
us for the proper amount of money, nor is the Congress appropriating
the proper amount of money. Indeed, the Congress has appropriated less
than half of what is needed to really provide machines and equipment
that are trustworthy and the education that the voters need in order to
use it.
That is the purpose of my remarks this evening. The Cleveland paper
says, ``Unfortunately, the solutions being proposed, involving an
assortment of computer-voting systems, may be worse than the problems
they were designed to fix.''
``How can you be assured after you vote'' in your home precinct
``that the machine actually recorded your vote?'' And ``with a paper
ballot, even a flawed ballot, at least there is a semi-permanent record
that we can return to . . . Would you buy an airplane ticket by
computer if there was no way to obtain a printed receipt of your
transaction?''
That is one of the problems of what is happening across our country.
There is no paper audit trail required in every precinct. That is why
the gentleman from New Jersey's (Mr. Holt) bill here in the House is an
absolutely proper way to proceed, requiring a paper audit trail at
every precinct in this country.
{time} 2015
And if we do not have that, we should not ask these States and
localities to purchase equipment that cannot provide a verifiable audit
trail.
Because there is so much confusion around the country, in every
single State, we should also provide for no-fault absentee voting. We
should pass that as a Congress. It should be a no-brainer, because we
should not leave our communities in upheaval as we face the elections
of 2004. We have already had experience with that.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer says, ``In the 2002 election, new computer
voting systems that were brought on in Florida lost more than 100,000
votes due to software error.'' The bill that the gentleman from New
Jersey (Mr. Holt) has offered would require a paper record of every
vote and require that all software for use in elections be verified in
advance.
I can tell my colleagues that in Ohio I sent five computer security
specialists down to the Statehouse to look at the five systems that
were being considered in Ohio. I was shocked at what they came back to
me with. There was not a single system Ohio was considering that was
both deemed very good or excellent in terms of computer security and in
terms of ease of use. In other words, because the Federal standards do
not exist, there is not a dependable system that a big State like Ohio
can actually purchase. But our States and localities are under the
impression that HAVA is forcing them to do all this by a year from this
November. Absolutely untrue. Go back and read HAVA. It does not say
that.
As reported in The New York Times last month, software flaws in a
popular system called Diebold Accuvote made it vulnerable to
manipulation. More than 33,000 of these machines are operating in 38
States and high-risk vulnerabilities were identified. In the March
primary election in California of this year, for example, these Diebold
machines were connected to the Internet with election tallies posted on
the Internet before the polls closed, which is absolutely not supposed
to happen. Those votes are supposed to be protected.
So if your life depended on the measurement of a single ballot, would
you prefer it be read by a machine or examined by three different human
beings at the precincts, as we have done it historically in this
country?
Mr. Speaker, I will have more to say on this in the days ahead.
The Presidential elections of 2000 were a debacle. Deep concerns
remain until today whether votes in Florida and in many other States
were accurately recorded.
Therefore, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which
authorized $650 million to enable our States and localities to
modernize their voting machines should they be needed, plus $3 billion
for a range of activities, including training poll workers and election
officials, voter education projects, and other matters routinely
involved with voting.
Importantly, the bill also authorized the establishment of an
Election Assistance Commission to serve as a national clearinghouse and
resource for the compilation of information and review of procedures
with respect to the administration of Federal elections. But that
commission is not functional to this day!
Money for Title I--the voting machines--was fully funded at $650
million.
The Election Assistance Commission was supposed to have been
appointed by the
[[Page H9716]]
President within 120 days of enactment of the act. The act was signed
on October 29, 2002. 120 days expired on February 26 of this year, and
the Commission was not appointed. The White House sent the nominations
to the Senate on October 3--219 days late. Hearings on the nominations
are scheduled for October 28--244 days late. By the time confirmations
are completed and officials are in place, it will be basically 1 year
late.
So, while our local election officials are counting on $3 billion to
help them improve election systems, the administration has not
requested nor has the Congress provided the amount authorized by the
act.
We authorized $1.4 billion for title II activities for fiscal year
2003, but appropriated only $830 million--only 59.26 percent of the
authorization.
We authorized $1 billion for fiscal 2004. The administration
requested only $490 million. The FY'04 Treasury/Transportation
appropriations bill provides a little more--$495 million. But it is
only 49.5 percent of the authorized amount.
Meanwhile, in the absence of sufficient guidance from the Federal
level, States have put together election improvement plans and are
looking to buy machines that will impact our elections for decades to
come without sufficient guidance from the yet-to-be appointed Election
Commission. Localities are scrambling to keep up with the requirements
of these State plans.
What has it meant? Recent studies have come out that seriously
question the security of these electronic voting machines, especially
the Diebold machines which are being purchased in Ohio, and in other
States. The manufacturers have dismissed these studies, but this
dismissal cannot be accepted.
The integrity of our voting system was the reason we adopted HAVA,
and is at the core of our election system.
Where is the Federal oversight that we are supposed to have?
What has the State of Ohio done to be sure that it is providing
adequate guidance to localities regarding secure equipment?
Several stories in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch,
and the Toledo Blade have highlighted ethical concerns regarding gifts
and favors provided by vendors trying to sell $100 million in high-tech
voting machines to 88 county election offices;
Stories have also highlighted the disturbing fact that Waledn O'Dell,
chief executive of Diebold, Inc., in the words of the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, ``The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio
told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is ``committed
to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next
year.''
Integrity--voters need to have voting devices that are beyond
reproach;
Dependability--we need systems that will work time and time again;
Sufficiency--funds must be available to provide the technical
assistance that our election systems need to achieve the goals that
were set out by HAVA while recovering from the loss of credibility
created by the 2000 election experience.
Integrity, Dependability, and Sufficiency are what we need. Instead
we have gotten
Half measures--funding that barely meets 50 percent of the
authorization requested by this administration and sanctioned by the
Congress;
Empty promises--an Election Assistance Commission that exists in name
only;
Confusion--our local officials do not know where to turn or exactly
what is expected of them;
Ethical lapses and suspect activities--selling voting machines like
we are at the Bazaar in Baghdad instead of the credible and demanding
American marketplace.
America deserves better. If we can afford to spend $3.9 billion a
month to ``secure democracy in Iraq,'' and can approve a supplemental
which contains more funding than might be available for several Federal
departments, can't we afford to spend $3 billion over 3 years to help
secure democracy here at home? Mr. Hoyer has said that he hopes to see
this amount of funding added to the final omnibus appropriations bill.
I will support him on it, and our leadership should as well. In order
to assure intregity in the election of 2004, we must pass legislation
to require (1) audible paper trail of votes at every precinct that can
be counted and verified, no fault absentee voting if a voter wishes to
use that option. (2) no fault absentee voting if a voter wishes to use
that option.
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