Yesterday the Senate Rules and Administration Committee held a hearing to receive testimony on S. 1487, the Ballot Integrity Act. So what's good about the bill? It includes a requirement for DRE voting machines to have a voter verified paper trail. In the event of a recount, the paper trail is considered to be the official ballot. What's bad about the bill? It doesn't require DRE's to have voter verified paper records until 2010 - two full years after the next Presidential and Congressional election.

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.

Kudos and thank yous go to Governor Richardson, both for what he has done for voters in the state of New Mexico, and today for an oped he wrote which appeared in The Hill in support of the paper ballot bill, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.  

In the November 2004 election, many New Mexico voters were forced to vote on paperless DREs.  True to form, these machines lost votes and added votes, and generally destroyed voter confidence in the elections process.  To address the situation, the Governor proposed a plan to move the State of New Mexico to a paper ballot system.  Of course, he encountered resistance, very similar to the resistance that Members of Congress are facing today for making our voting systems reliable and secure:  "Change is bad."  It is costly.  It can't be done.  It can't be done quickly.

But with the Governor's leadership, New Mexico converted to a paper ballot system in less than a year.  This past election, the number of machine-related voting problems dropped dramatically in New Mexico.  Now we just need that kind of leadership on voting machines in Congress.  Swift.  Bold.  Decisive.

You might recall the post-election controversy last November where Democrat Christine Jennings lost a Florida House race to Republican Vern Buchanan by 369 votes in an election where approximately 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County were "missing."

What do you mean "missing"? you might ask. After today, we will probably never know. A three judge panel ruled today that Ms. Jennings will not be allowed to review the programming source code of the paperless electronic voting that "lost" the votes. Such codes, the the trial and appeals court ruled, should remain secret to protect the machine company's patented code.

From CQ:

By voice vote, the three-member House Administration Committee task force agreed to launch a formal investigation.  They also agrees to use GAO experts to design a reliability test for the voting machines in question.

As expected, there's disagreement:

The Maryland Senate has effectively quashed a bill that would have required voting machines to produce a paper record. A similar bill passed the House but the Senate bill was voted back to committee.

House bill sponsor Sheila Hixson was very disappointed, as are the many advocates who've been working on this issue for years in Maryland. Here's an excerpt from the report in the Baltimore Sun:

The Senate bill had dropped the requirement for audits, a piece of the "paper trail" legislation that Common Cause and many other voting reform groups feel is essential.

If a companion bill to Hixson's isn't acted upon in the next two weeks, Maryland will face the 2008 elections with the same issues as previous elections. Last year a similar bill passed the House and had the support of then-Governor Ehrlich but died in the Senate. Election supervisor Linda Lamone, a long-time vocal opponent of paper records, must have some good friends in the Senate, along with her pals at Diebold.

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."

The editorial contains some other turns of phrase that I particularly like, such as:

It's been a great seven days for election reform. Last Thursday, Florida's governor Charlies Crist teamed up with long-time paper ballot advocate Representative Robert Wexler to announce support for a plan to scrap Florida's infamous paperless DREs by the 2008, and replace them with optical scan machines.

Then, yesterday, Representative Rush Holt introduced the latest version of his bill, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007," H.R. 811, which already boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of 170 co-sponsors.

Finally, this morning, Sen. Diane Feinstein held a hearing on the voting machine issue. She has promised to introduce a bill soon that would be the Senate counterpart to Holt's House bill. For more on the hearing, and to hear a recording of it, go to VerifiedVoting.org's webpage.

There is no doubt that these changes are happening at least in part due to the intense citizen lobbying pressure voters have exerted in recent months. Our GetItStraightBy2008.org campaign has logged thousands of emails and phone calls to Florida and the U.S. Congress. We haven't won yet, but victory is definitely within reach.