[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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