Pending Election Reform In Congress Doesn't Give Citizens Right To Sue

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/50492

Pending Election Reform in Congress Doesn't Give Citizens Right to Sue

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted April 13, 2007.

A law regulating voting machines making its way through Congress lacks a provision allowing voters to sue -- a right that was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Should citizens explicitly be allowed to sue if they can prove their votes have been stolen or miscounted by electronic voting machines?

As election integrity activists focus their attention on pressuring the House Committee on Administration to ban electronic voting machines when Congress reconvenes next week, the question of whether voters can individually sue -- known as a private cause of action -- has received scant public attention. But that legal right, which was a cornerstone of the federal Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, is not in the panel's bill, H.R. 811. Instead, the bill says citizens can sue under other preexisting laws.

"There is no new private cause of action," said John Bonifaz, a noted voting rights attorney who is now a senior legal fellow with Demos, a New York City-based progressive think tank that focuses on numerous pro-democracy issues, speaking of the bill proposed by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J.

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Including an explicit private cause of action in H.R. 811 is also critical for opponents of electronic voting machines, although few have made that argument. The Holt bill, as now written, would allow electronic voting machines if a durable paper printout of individual votes that citizens could verify was made available. That proposed standard, which the bill's authors hope will regulate many problem-plagued machines out of use, is still dubious for one primary reason: With the exception of optical-scan ballots, where individual voters mark the ballots by hand or by nontabulating ballot marking devices that are then scanned by computers, there is no way to discern actual individual voter intent if an election is contested and goes to a recount. (Never mind that the envisioned durable printers for DREs do not yet exist!)

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