Standardized voting bill fast-tracked despite county objections

A bill to impose one-size-fits-all procedures for conducting federal elections has been sent to the floor of the House of Representatives, where it is on a fast track despite an avalanche of letters from county officials warning of dire consequences for the presidential election in 2008.

H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, was approved by the House Administration Committee with a party-line vote of 6–3 on May 8.

The bill mandates standardized procedures to be followed in every polling place in America and puts poll workers in a position to be sued for failure to comply with those procedures. While billed as requiring a “paper trail” for elections for federal office, it goes much further than any previous state legislation in this area.

H.R. 811 would require counties to junk most of the voting equipment that has been purchased to comply with state legislation requiring a “voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) and switch to exclusive use of optical-scan ballots. Electronic voting machines that print on reel-to-reel paper would be banned beginning in 2010; those that do not, including voting equipment used in 18 states — and statewide in Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee — would be banned beginning in 2008.

In addition, the legislation would ban the use of electronic scanning equipment in conducting recounts and audits, with recounts to be conducted solely by human hand and eye. It would require an auditor to conduct a partial recount in all races where the winning candidate won more than 80 percent of the vote. In this instance, between 3 percent and 10 percent of all precincts would have to be recounted by hand with “zero tolerance” for discrepancies in the hand-count before the state would be permitted to certify the result of the election.

Counties have found such hand recounts to be time- and labor-intensive. Human hands and eyes do not count as reliably or consistently as electronic ballot scanning technology. However, elections are often certified within a very short time because the certified result is used as the basis for recounts and contested elections. In fact, county officials have warned that they may be unable to certify a result in a close presidential election before the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December — the deadline for the Electoral College — resulting in the election’s being decided by the House of Representatives.

Even such apocalyptic warnings have gone unheeded, however, even as Democratic Party-operatives have seized on H.R. 811 as a vehicle to gain partisan advantage by exploiting concerns about the integrity of electronic voting equipment.

High-ranking officials such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have placed telephone calls to leading Democratic county officials urging them to support H.R. 811; members of Congress have been instructed to keep their concerns to themselves and leave the heavy lifting on this legislation to the Senate. MoveOn.org issued an appeal to its activists this week to step up telephone calls in support of the bill, citing “dozens of letters” from “powerful election officials who think paper ballots are unnecessary.”

In fact, the National Association of Counties has not objected to legislation that would require a voter-verifiable paper trail. Doug Lewis, executive director of the nonprofit Election Center, summed up the position of most county election officials in a quote printed recently by columnist David Broder for The Washington Post:

“I have no problem with the objective of creating paper receipts,” Lewis said. “But they have rejected every idea we’ve offered them to show what might work. I’ve been at this 40-some years, and I have not seen a piece of legislation worse than this. It is overly prescriptive, overly detailed, a cumbersome monstrosity to deal with.”