The headline of a front-page story in today's New York Times - entitled "Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed" - is somewhat misleading.
Negotiations are still under way to pass a bill by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 811), which would require electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper record of their vote. Holt and House Speaker Pelosi are doing their best to bring the bill to the floor for a House vote, despite mounting resistance from state and local election officials who complain the implementation timelines in the bill are too short.
We will continue to support Holt and Pelosi in those efforts, and are encouraged that talk is still happening. We will keep working tirelessly toward a resolution and are hopeful it will take place.
It is also essential that Congress recognize that we cannot go through one more national election in which the mechanics of our democracy - our voting systems - are not as secure as they can be, and that voters are not confident that their ballots will be counted as cast.
How do we try and bring democracy to Iraq when we cannot even get our own voting systems working securely?
We can't.
In the last three elections we have seen repeatedly paperless electronic voting machines malfunction and lose votes. American voters have called loudly for secure reliable elections, and that is what we will continue to fight for.
Stay tuned - we are far from finished.
I just wanted to quickly let everyone know that the New York Times today has an editorial in praise of Sen. Feinstein's work in the Senate to require all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot. The headline sums up the heart of the paper ballot movement - "Making Democracy Credible."
It is good news that Ms. Feinstein has called for the federal investigations -- and that she is pushing a bill to require paper trails nationally. As long as there are no paper records, and voting machine manufacturers continue to insist that the software that runs the machines is a "trade secret," voters cannot be expected to trust that votes are being counted correctly. The leadership in Congress needs to focus on making sure that Ms. Feinstein's paper-trail bill becomes law, along with a companion House measure from Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey.
The editorial contains some other turns of phrase that I particularly like, such as:
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