Reply #159: Voting Technology Hearings in House & Senate prior to HAVA Act

[rumpel]

While serious issues and problems have been voiced, I do not see anything in the resulting HAVA Act, to prevent these problems. All that the HAVA appears to be doing is create commissions for research, and money allocation. Or Have I missed something?
I have included the members of both committees, albeit this is current info, and not of 2001 when the hearings occured.
It appears these are the only hearings on voting technology.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.3295.enr:

Full Committee Hearing on National Energy Policy – Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group
http://www.house.gov/science/full/fchearings.htm

II.       Witnesses
There will be one panel of four witnesses:

(1)   Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere, Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Project Manager of the Caltech-MIT Voting Project.  The Voting Project was created in December 2000 to prevent a recurrence of the problems that threatened the 2000 elections.  Specific tasks of the project include evaluating the current state of reliability and uniformity of U.S. voting systems, and proposing uniform standards and quantitative guidelines for performance and reliability of voting systems.  The Voting Project just completed a March 30, 2001 preliminary assessment of the reliability of existing voting equipment. 

excerpt:

1.  High rates of uncounted, unmarked, and spoiled ballots – what we call residual votes.  The average incidence of such votes is about 2 out of 100 ballots cast over the last four presidential elections.   These ballots vary by state.  Massachusetts and Maryland have fairly low rates of residual votes – less that 1 percent.  New Mexico, South Carolina, Georgia, and Illinois had high residual vote rates – above 3 percent of all ballots cast. Some counties have residual vote rates in presidential elections as high as 20 percent or 30 percent of all ballots cast.

Our project has examined what one of our group calls the “epidemiology of voting.”  I have distributed to the committee one of our reports that examines the extent to which the residual vote rate depends on equipment used in the counties.    Counties using punch cards average the highest residual vote rate, approximately 3 percent of ballots cast.  Counties using electronic equipment also post relatively high average residual vote rates. Counties using paper, lever machines, and optical scanners average 2 percent or less.  

We should lower the residual vote rate.  Getting rid of punch cards is probably a good first step.  But even 2 percent seems too high.  Our project’s goal is a residual vote rate of one-half of one percent, which approximately 10 percent of counties currently achieve.  There are many ways that this could be accomplished – more poll workers, voter education, better machines.

2.  Errors in voter registration data bases.  In response to NVRA a number of states and counties have undertaken considerable projects to develop computerized voter registration systems and clean up their voter registration rolls.   In doing so, these states have estimated the number of duplicate or incorrect registrations.  Michigan, for example, encountered 1 million duplicate registrations out of approximately 9 million registered voters.  Los Angeles County audited their rolls and estimates that 25 percent of all registrations have some sort of problematic or incorrect information.

According to the Current Population Survey conducted by the US Census, in the 2000 election approximately 3 million registered voters did not vote because of registration problems.

We should set standards for quality of data bases and fund efforts to clean the data bases and make these data electronically accessible at polling places.

(2)   Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at Bryn Mawr College, is a nationally recognized expert on voting technologies and standards.  In October 2000, she successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, “Electronic Vote Tabulation Checks & Balances.”

excerpt:
Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the voter (or election officials) can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated.  Any programmer can write code that displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another result.  There is no known way to ensure that this is not happening inside of a voting system.

Electronic balloting and tabulation makes the tasks performed by poll workers, challengers, and election officials  purely procedural, and removes any opportunity to perform bipartisan checks.  Any computerized election process is thus entrusted to the small group of individuals who program, construct and maintain the machines.  The risk that these systems may be compromised is present whether the computers are reading punched cards or optical scanned sheets, or are kiosk-style or Internet balloting systems.

excerpt:
Now the computer industry has already established standards for secure system certification, mandated by Congress under the Computer Security Act of 1987.  NIST typically administers this certification for devices purchased by the Department of Defense.  Congress, though, exempted itself from compliance with the Act, hence they have never certified the accuracy and integrity of any computer-based voting systems used in Federal elections.  This loophole must be changed.  The existing standards are far from perfect, but they are the best assurance mechanism that the computer industry has at present.  (It is important to understand that the Federal Election Commission does not now have voting system standards in place.  Instead, the purchasers and vendors use an obsolete set of suggested practices that were never adopted by all of the States.) 

To date, no electronic voting system has been certified to even the lowest level of the U.S. government or international computer security standards (such as the ISO Common Criteria or its predecessor, TCSEC/ITSEC), nor has any been required to comply with such.  No voting system vendor has voluntarily complied with these standards (although voluntary compliance occurs within other industries, such as health care and banking), despite the fact that most have been made aware of their existence and utility in secure product development. There are also no required standards for voting displays, so computer ballots can be constructed to give advantage to some candidates over others

(3)   Dr. Doug Jones, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa, has served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems since 1994, and has chaired the board since the fall of 1999.  This board, appointed by the Iowa Secretary of State, must examine and approve all voting machines before they can be offered for sale to county governments.  The board meets whenever a manufacturer wishes to offer a new voting machine or a new modification of an existing machine for sale in the state of Iowa.

excerpt:
Today, all new precinct-count voting machines are offered with communication options; this includes direct-recording voting machines, optical mark-sense ballot readers, and punched-card ballot readers. These allow the machines to electronically communicate the vote totals to a machine at the county level that computes county wide vote totals within minutes of the close of the polls.

quote:
The use of a proprietary Microsoft operating system in a voting machine and the fact that the current standards provide us with no control over this use is particularly troublesome! Microsoft is currently in the midst of an antitrust case -- which is to say, it is in an adversary relationship with the Federal government! Thus, the company has great reason to be interested in the outcome of elections.

In fact, about a year ago, I remember hearing a Microsoft representative state that he hoped to delay hearings on their antitrust case until after the election because he believed that Microsoft would receive a more favorable hearing from a Bush administration, and I remember that, when asked about this, then candidate Bush confirmed that he did not favor the antitrust litigation.

Thus, we are in the bizarre situation that our current standards exempt large portions of software in voting machinery from inspection, where those portions happen to be made by an organization that has taken a partisan position in an upcoming political race!

(4)   Mr. Roy Saltman is a consultant and a retired employee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly, the National Bureau of Standards) who authored the 1988 National Bureau of Standards report, “Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying,” that first raised the difficulties of using punch cards and other machine-readable ballots.  He also authored the 1978 National Bureau of Standards study, “Science & Technology: Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote-Tallying.”

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE
MEMBERSHIP - 108th CONGRESS

Jurisdiction
The Science Committee has jurisdiction over all non-defense federal scientific research and development (R&D). Federal agencies that fall under the Committee's jurisdiction (either completely or partially) include: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Fire Administration, and U.S. Geological Survey.

Republican Members (25)
Democratic Members (22)

Ralph M. Hall, Texas
Bart Gordon, Tennessee

Lamar S. Smith, Texas
Jerry F. Costello, Illinois

Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania
Eddie Bernice Johnson, Texas

Dana Rohrabacher, California
Lynn C. Woolsey, California

Ken Calvert, California
Nick Lampson, Texas

Nick Smith, Michigan
John B. Larson, Connecticut

Roscoe G. Bartlett, Maryland
Mark Udall, Colorado

Vernon J. Ehlers, Michigan
David Wu, Oregon

Gil Gutknecht, Minnesota
Michael M. Honda, California

George R. Nethercutt, Jr., Washington
Brad Miller, North Carolina

Frank D. Lucas, Oklahoma
Lincoln Davis, Tennessee

Judy Biggert, Illinois
Sheila Jackson-Lee, Texas

Wayne Gilchrest, Maryland
Zoe Lofgren, California

W. Todd Akin, Missouri
Brad Sherman, California

Timothy V. Johnson, Illinois
Brian Baird, Washington

Melissa A. Hart, Pennsylvania
Dennis Moore, Kansas

J. Randy Forbes, Virginia
Anthony Weiner. New York

Phil Gingrey, Georgia
Jim Matheson, Utah

Rob Bishop, Utah
Dennis Cardoza, California

Michael C. Burgess, Texas
Vacancy

Jo Bonner, Alabama
Vacancy

Tom Feeney. Florida
Vacancy

Randy Neugebauer, Texas

The Hearing in The Senate 5/8/01
Election Reform Hearing Set for May 8

        Washington, DC – The Full Committee hearing on Election Reform is scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, at 9:30 a.m. in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building.  Senator McCain will preside.  Members will examine the reliability of current and future voting technologies.

        Following is the tentative witness list (not necessarily in order of appearance):
 
Honorable Sheila Jackson Lee, Representative, Texas

Panel I
Honorable Betsey Bayless, Secretary of State, Arizona
Honorable John Willis, Secretary of State, Maryland

Panel II
Honorable Robert H. Michel, Co-Chair, National Commission on Federal Election Reform
Honorable Bill Richardson, National Commission on Federal Election Reform
Dr. Stephen Ansolabehere, Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://www.commerce.senate.gov/hearings/hearings01.htm

Committee Members
Ted Stevens - Alaska
Hart 522   202-224-3004

John McCain - Arizona
Russell 241   202-224-2235

Conrad Burns - Montana
Dirksen 187   202-224-2644

Trent Lott - Mississippi
Russell 487   202-224-6253

Kay Bailey Hutchison - Texas
Russell 284   202-224-5922

Olympia Snowe - Maine
Russell 250   202-224-5344

Gordon Smith - Oregon
Russell 404   202-224-3753

John Ensign - Nevada
Russell 290   202-224-6244

George Allen - Virginia
Hart 708   202-224-4024

John Sununu - New Hampshire
Russell C4   202-224-2841

Jim DeMint - South Carolina
Hart 825    202-224-6121

David Vitter - Louisiana
Hart 825A    202-224-4623

Daniel K. Inouye - Hawaii
Hart 722   202-224-3934

John D. Rockefeller IV - West Virginia
Hart 531   202-224-6472

John F. Kerry - Massachussetts
Russell 304   202-224-2742

Byron L. Dorgan - North Dakota
Hart 713   202-224-2551

Barbara Boxer - California
Hart 112   202-224-3553

Bill Nelson - Florida
Hart 716   202-224-5274

Maria Cantwell - Washington
Hart 717   202-224-3441

Frank Lautenberg - New Jersey
Hart 825A   202-224-3224

Bennjamin E. Nelson - Nebraska
Hart 720    202-224-6551

Mark Pryor - Arkansas
Russell 217    202-224-2353