Getting Ready for the Vote: Democrats Compromise on Reforms

With the presidential primaries around the corner, states are beginning to worry about the voting system reforms that were supposed to be completed by 2008.

Although at one time a Democratic priority, House Democrats are agreeing to postpone the changes until 2012. House leaders have decided to heed the pleas of state and local officials, as well as lobbyists for the disabled, all of whom worry that there is not enough time to complete the reforms for the presidential primary.

The Reforms: Issues and Goals

Making voting accessible

One goal of the reforms is to make it easier for more people and more kinds of people to vote – a persistent theme throughout the history of voting reform in this country.

Legislators want to guarantee easy access to voting machines by the handicapped without limiting the technology available to everyone else. Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, the bill’s original sponsor, has long expressed a preference for optically scanned ballots that are marked by the voters themselves instead of computers. But so far House leaders are siding with advocates for the handicapped, who fear that they cannot use optical ballots without help. Recording the vote

The reforms also deal with how we record voting, both to prevent fraud, and to confirm very close elections like we saw in 2000 and 2004 —a relatively new phenomenon in US Presidential elections.

The legislation would include several substantial changes such as paper ballots or printouts for computerized votes in the event of a recount. It would also require localities to audit most federal races to make sure that the voting machines had worked properly. To protect against computer glitches, both House and Senate bills would require voting-machine manufacturers to make the software codes that run the machines available to government authorities, although neither bill would require that they be released publicly, as some computer experts have advocated.

In addition, the House bill would authorize $1 billion to pay for the equipment upgrades, while the Senate version calls for $600 million. Under the House proposal, six states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina and Tennessee —would have to add the paper trails to their touch-screen machines by November 2008. New York would have to replace their lever-machines with optical-scan or touch-screen machines with printers by then.

Paper ballots

The bill would allow states to add a cash register-like printer to their already-existing voting machines for the 2008 and 2010 elections. Critics worry about the quality of these printers, saying that the paper is thin and could easily rip or jam the machine and the ink may smear. But legislators in favor of the plan argue that some sort of paper trail is needed for the upcoming elections.

In 2003, a group of concerned computer science professors from Stanford began to argue that computerized voting machines should have a paper-audit component. One of the most outspoken of the group, Professor David Dill, was consequently placed on a task force for election reform and succeeded in convincing then-Secretary of State Kevin Shelley (D) of the importance of a paper trail.

What do we do with the paper records?

The question of what to do with paper records has advocates arguing as well.

Twenty-five states have laws demanding that voters verify and then hand over to election officials a paper ballot, and 16 of those require that the paper "receipts" be considered in the case of any recount. Laws in Nevada and Idaho, on the other hand, stipulate that the electronic ballots -- not the paper audit -- should be used.

For advocates of the paper trail, using paper ballots to recount makes sense because the paper representation of the ballot is well understood, and hey, why not use them when you went to all this trouble?

But those opposed say that recounting paper ballots is too time-consuming, especially since they must be hand counted, as there is no machine to process them by the thousands like punch-card ballots.

Setting national standards

An overlying goal of the reforms is to move us closer to a standardized national voting system.

The legislation is the first voting-rights bill since the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002, which left voting largely up to the states, and under which the federal government has spent more than $3 billion.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has said that postponing changes for now makes sense, because she believes that Republicans will be willing to vote with the Democrats for comprehensive national voting reform by 2012.

There’s still time to tell your representatives what you think about voting reforms!

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