The early worm gets eaten by the bird

When it comes to voting machines, it would be easy to deride New York State for yet another example of foot-dragging bureaucratic incompetence. That’s apparently the opinion of the judge who told state officials, on December 20, that they have only until January 4 to come up with a timeline for complying with federal law requiring they update the state’s voting system.

As noted in “New York voting future still uncertain” in our December 6 issue, New York is now the only state that has not certified a list of voting machines as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). In fact, other states have not only compiled such a list, but completed their purchases.

But the recent history of states that let themselves be stampeded into buying voting machines according to HAVA, a law written too hastily and with too much deference to the companies that stood to profit from it, suggests that it is New York State, not the judge, that may be in the right here.

The major cause for delay has been that New Yorkers have engaged in an unusually vigorous tussle over whether the proposed guidelines for selecting machines sufficiently guaranteed factors like reliability, security, trustworthiness and accessibility. This meant that it took a correspondingly long time to set up the rules and regulations meant to guide the certifying procedure. And now that those rules have been set, we find that they are so stringent that none of the machines currently available satisfies the requirements New York State has spelled out.

Ludicrous? Well, let’s see how things turned out for the star pupils who turned in their homework on time.

After buying thousands of touch-screen machines, Florida has now banned them all after testing repeatedly showed them to be unacceptably vulnerable. They now have 25,000 for them up for sale—and still owe $33 million on them. In California, Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified Diebold and three other electronic voting systems after a thoroughgoing review earlier this year. Just a couple of weeks ago, a study commissioned by the Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner found critical security failures in all five voting systems in that state. Brunner is recommending that all their touch-screen machines be replaced. And last Tuesday, the Colorado secretary of state decertified machines in six of the state’s 10 most populous counties, concluding among other things that “the federal certification process is inadequate.”

In Pennsylvania, the state attorney general decided that machines with a paper trail were unconstitutional. Pennsylvania counties therefore bought machines without a paper trail, and are now facing the probability that a federal requirement for such a system will soon be passed by Congress.

All around the country, in short, states that have already purchased machines are finding that they will have to scrap them. The root of the problem is the original law, which was rushed through without sufficient thought about safeguarding that sine qua non of democracy, the safety and reliability of the system for counting our votes. HAVA, like most of the legislation passed in this country of late, wound up being a law by and for big corporations. The “Election Systems Task Force,” a lobbying group set up by technology firms specifically to influence this legislation, had on the record as an agenda item for a conference call meeting dated August 22, 2002, “How do we get Congress to fund a move to electronic voting?”

The resulting law was brilliantly efficient at handing out largesse to the electronic voting machine companies: an estimated $3.9 billion so far. But in the rush to hand out corporate welfare, not much thought was given to securing American citizens’ votes. And now, states that met the bill’s deadline are having to pay the price.

As reported by Newsday, the district judge, Gary Sharpe, spent much of the December 20 hearing castigating New York for failing to act while other states did. The deluge of recent decertifications suggests exactly the opposite: that it is the fools who rushed in, while the wise held scrupulous standards to be more important than an arbitrary federal deadline.

HAVA is a badly flawed law and the federal certification system backing it up is deeply inadequate. The result has been voting machines nationwide that are unreliable, vulnerable to hacking, and in many cases provide no backup for meaningful recounts when they fail, as they so frequently do. The fact that the judicial system is apparently unwilling to back up the sanctity of the vote is yet another warning sign that our democracy is at risk. Let’s hope New York can find a way to comply with the judge’s deadline without giving up on the idea that every vote should count.

Dr. Punnybone

It's Over!