Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed
July 20, 2007
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-
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,
York
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
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
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
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 -
jurisdictions in 14 others would have to add the paper trails to
their touch-screen machines by November 2008.
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.