Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed
Brett
Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are slowing their drive to
revamp the nation's voting systems, aides said yesterday.
Under pressure from state and local officials, as well as from
lobbyists for the disabled, House leaders now advocate putting off the
most sweeping changes until 2012, four years later than planned.
Overhauling voting systems before next year's presidential election
had once been a top Democratic priority, primarily to allow greater
accountability and be certain that all votes registered on
computerized touch-screen systems were counted. But state and local
elections officials told Congress they could not make the changes in
time for the balloting in November 2008, particularly in light of the
extra workload involved in preparing for next year's much-earlier
presidential primary season.
Confronted by similar concerns, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of
California and the chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee, said she
had already decided against seeking any major changes in voting
equipment before 2010.
"My sense is there's no way to get this thing in place by the election
of 2008," Ms. Feinstein said. "Without adequate time, we could cause
real problems in the election."
Senate Democrats say that stretching out the timetable could increase
their chances to win enough Republican support to put the changes into
law.
House Democratic officials say they are now working on compromise
legislation that could allow hundreds of counties in 20 states to
simply add tiny, cash-register-style printers to their touch-screen
machines for the 2008 and 2010 elections, while waiting for
manufacturers to develop better technology by 2012.
House officials said the compromise would ensure that all voting
machines nationwide would have some kind of paper trail in 2008
through which voters could verify that their ballots were properly
recorded and that could be used in recounts. Under the plan, New York,
which has delayed replacing its old lever machines, would be the only
state that would have to change its entire voting system by November
2008.
But critics say that while billions have been spent to improve voting
since the disputed presidential election in 2000, the compromise would
leave a patchwork and somewhat jury-rigged system that would still be
vulnerable to tampering or computer malfunctions in next year's
elections. Many experts have criticized the add-on printers, which use
thin rolls of relatively fragile paper, as too prone to paper jams and
smearing to ensure that every vote is counted.
The House leadership is negotiating with Representative Rush D. Holt,
Democrat of New Jersey, the bill's original sponsor, over the details
of the compromise. Those talks, however, have hit a snag over how to
guarantee easy access to voting machines by the handicapped without
limiting the technology available to everyone else. Mr. Holt has long
expressed a preference for optically scanned ballots marked by voters,
but so far House leaders are siding with advocates for the
handicapped, who fear that they cannot use optical ballots without
help.
Reached by phone yesterday, Mr. Holt would not discuss details of the
negotiations. But he said: "There are a lot of competing interests,
and this has for years been a difficult bill. It also could still be
tough to resolve the issues that are remaining."
If a deal is reached soon, the House could vote on the bill within two
weeks. House leaders also need to hold onto Mr. Holt's support. Mr.
Holt, a former Princeton University physicist, is the leading expert
on voting technology in Congress, and any deal could fall apart if he
withdrew his support.
The proposed legislation is the second effort by Congress to fix the
nation's voting system since the bitter fights over hanging punch-card
chads in Florida. Under the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, the
federal government has spent more than $3 billion to help states and
counties modernize their voting systems, installing thousands of touch-
screen and other machines. But since then, growing concerns about the
reliability and the security of some of the machines had led to
widespread calls for another overhaul.
As a result, the proposed compromise is a blow to some computer
scientists and other activists, who would like to get rid of the touch-
screen machines used by nearly 40 percent of American voters. They had
hoped that a tighter deadline would force states and localities to
quickly shift from touch-screens to optical-scan systems, in which
ballots are marked by the voters themselves rather than being
generated by computers.
But state and local election officials, weary from all the changes
they had already made, argued that it is already too late to make such
significant changes without creating chaos next year. Advocates for
the blind and the disabled also threatened to oppose the bill if it
went too far in discouraging the use of touch-screen machines before
the optical scanners were made easier for them to use. And House
officials - led by the majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer,
Democrat of Maryland, who is trying to broker the deal - said they
wanted to avoid another buying spree if better equipment might be
available later.
House aides said that Mr. Hoyer, who has long taken a lead on voting
and disability-rights issues, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California
do not want to undercut any of the gains that the disabled had made in
voting without assistance. They also said that the compromise would
achieve the Democrats' main goal - ensuring that there would be a
paper back-up for each vote cast in November 2008 - while allowing
more time to move to systems with more durable ballots.
As the talks stand now, the proposed bill would include several
substantial changes that Mr. Holt has long sought. Like Ms.
Feinstein's version in the Senate, the House bill would generally make
the paper ballots or printouts the official votes in the event of a
recount. It would require localities to conduct rigorous audits of
most federal races to ensure that the voting machines had worked
properly.
To guard against computer bugs, both bills also would require
manufacturers to make the software code that runs their machines
available to government authorities, though neither bill would require
that it be released publicly, as some computer experts have advocated.
In addition, the House bill would authorize $1 billion in additional
spending to help pay for the equipment upgrades, while the Senate
version calls for $600 million.
Under the proposal in the House, six states - Delaware, Georgia,
Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee - and various
jurisdictions in 14 others would have to add the paper trails to their
touch-screen machines by November 2008. New York would have to install
either optical-scan machines or buy touch-screens with printers by
then.
Votes can also be lost on the optical-scan systems, and election
officials say it can be cumbersome to use them in large cities where
ballots have to be printed in many languages. But if scanners can be
made easier for the disabled to use, many computer experts believe
they could eventually dominate the voting landscape.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/washington/20vote.html