Fixing the Machines
In November 2006, voters in Sarasota County, Florida, went to vote in the highly charged race to succeed Katherine Harris in the 13th Congressional District. All but absentee voters were relegated to voting on Sarasota’s paperless, unverifiable iVotronic voting machines. Unfortunately, these voters’ worst fears were realized. Sarasota County’s voting machines failed to register a vote for approximately 18,000 voters in that race—more than one out of every seven voters who attempted to vote on these machines.
Even though almost 15 percent of the voters in Sarasota County saw their votes disappear in this election, the state certified the winner by a margin of only 369 votes—less than 0.2 percent of the total vote. Meanwhile, dozens of voters have submitted sworn testimony that the machines changed, or flipped, their votes, required multiple attempts to register their votes, or completely failed to register their votes at all. (Watch testimony from Sarasota voters, who packed our meeting held to share their concerns.)
Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey recently introduced H.R. 811, with the bipartisan support of 191 co-sponsors (as of February 15, 2007). This bill, titled the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, is designed to prevent what happened in Sarasota County from ever happening again, requiring all voting technology to be voter-verifiable, fully audited, and accessible to all voters. People For the American Way, Common Cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice, Vote Trust USA, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, MoveOn.org, election technology expert Avi Rubin, and others support the bill.
What People For, and those other groups, realizes is that it is urgent that legislation requiring verifiable, auditable, and accessible voting must be passed now, or we will likely be stuck with the status quo—millions of voters relegated to voting on technology that is not properly audited, does not allow for the voter to verify their vote, and does not provide for meaningful recounts.
While People For continues to work with Representative Holt and members of Congress to improve this bill, it is still a giant leap forward in improving the integrity of our election. Our window of opportunity is narrow. If we fail to act as soon as possible this year, the ability of jurisdictions to attempt to comply with this law will be severely compromised, thus potentially undermining the 2008 presidential elections.
Some who share our concerns about the reliability of our election technology in its present state have raised serious questions about the bill. The following discussion will attempt to address those issues.
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