Senator Diane Feinstein has recently released a "Ballot Integrity Act of 2007." The bill, co-sponsored by Senators Brown, Clinton, Dodd, Inouye, Kennedy, Leahy, Menendez, Obama and Sanders, presents an alternative of sorts to Representative Rush Holt's HR811 "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007."
Unfortunately, there are grave concerns about the Feinstein bill, as forwarded by scholarly election researcher Kathy Dopp in
This is not much of an alternative.
FOR THE RECORD: WE DO NOT NEED MORE ‘ALTERNATIVE’ LEGISLATION TO CORRECT OUR ELECTION PROBLEMS. We need everyone to get on board with two objectives: 1) fix the Holt bill, and 2) get behind it, but only when its problems have been fixed. Brad Friedman of bradblog, who has worked tirelessly – like Dopp and others – on elections fraud, has persuasively laid out the argument that the Holt bill needs help. It must ensure PAPER BALLOTS FOR ALL VOTERS, and it must ensure THAT THE BALLOTS ARE COUNTED ON ELECTION NIGHT.
But the Feinstein bill is not the answer. Kathy points out that Feinstein's "Ballot Integrity Act" manual audit provisions are terrible compared to HR811:
1. Its audits are not independent, but may be conducted internally by election officials. (Section 304)
2. No audits are required until the 2010 election. (Section 201(d))
3. Its voluntary standards for audit procedures must be voted on by the EAC. As Kathy points out, the EAC, whose Executive Director and Chair were original board members of a group founded by voting vendors called The Election Center, recently voted against a requirement for voter verifiable paper records that are necessary to independently audit vote count accuracy.
4. Holt’s HR811 requires that nonpartisan US GAO standards for independent auditing be applied. Feinstein’s bill does not mention the GAO.
5. Only 2% of precincts are required to be audited, with no adjustment for close races. (Section 202)
6. It does not require audits to be publicly verifiable by committing the data first (a practice required in auditing in any field), so unaudited counts could be manipulated after the audit to match the vote totals.
7. Its audits do not require comparing the voter verified ballots with the electronic tallies used to tally votes on the central tabulator. Instead the language says "the audit shall compare the vote tallies from the hand count of the individual, durable, voter-verified paper records . . . with electronic tallies" (Section 202(a) (1)), so that the polling location electronic tallies could be used instead. So Feinstein's bill contains nothing to prevent sham or manipulate-able audits, in contrast to HR811.
7. Paperless DRE systems are not required to be replaced until the 2010 elections - States with paperless voting systems shall certify to the EAC by July, 2009 that they will comply with the new requirements by the deadline of January, 2010. (Section 201(a) (2) (A))
8. Feinstein's bill requires the elimination of voting systems using VVPT rolls but seems not to fund monies for replacing them.
9. Feinstein's bill sets up a new "audit guidelines task force" but does not require taskforce members to have qualifications to set such standards (Section 223), and its audit standards are voluntary and the EAC must vote to adopt the voluntary standards (Section 224). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is tasked to give advice on the audit standards, but the US GAO, which has considerable expertise in auditing, is not. The audit task force is not required to be multi-partisan or to have members who are mathematicians, statisticians, gaming professionals, or anyone with the expertise to ensure that the audit protocols or procedures would be correctly set, nor does it require that election integrity advocates be on the audit guidelines task force. 1. Section 101 imposes a moratorium on acquiring for elections "a DRE voting system ... that does not produce a voter-verified paper record as required by section 301(a)(2). GOOD ONE. 10. Other provisions re handling of military, overseas, provisional, and early voting.
10. The "Ballot Integrity Act" sets up a clearinghouse of information on the experiences of state and local governments in implementing audit guidelines that is required to collect the experiences of election officials -- who have historically covered up evidence of election problems -- but no experiences of election integrity advocates or voters or expert citizens is collected. (Section 224)
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Other bad provisions in the "Ballot Integrity Act" include:
1. Requires the implementation of text conversion technology specifically rather than making functional requirements and leaving the implementation open-ended, and this is also unfunded. (Section 201(a) (2) (A))
2. Requires partial software disclosure but only "as necessary to assess the integrity and efficacy of such software" and "only for the purpose of administering or enforcing election laws, or for review, analysis, and reporting" for use in litigation, but not as necessary for verifying that the certified software was actually the same as that used during the election.
3. Allows voting devices which tally votes and which are used to program ballot definitions to be connected to the Internet, thus leaving voting systems wide open to malicious tampering through the Internet. (Section 201(b) (1))
4. Implements discretionary un-enforceable requirements that any software, other than election-dedicated software, be disclosed, as the Commission deems appropriate.
5. Requires that chain of custody (security procedures) for voting systems and ballots be disclosed to the Commission but does not require that they be disclosed to the public. (Section 201(b) (1))
6. Insufficient funding to meet all its requirements; only $600M to replace voting systems.
Note: Dopp adds that the "Ballot Integrity Act" does fill in some gaps in HR811. Good features of the "Ballot Integrity Act" include:
2. Requires durable individual voter-verified paper records – thus making paper-roll DREs that violate voter privacy and are not durable illegal by 2010. (Section 201(a)(1)(A)
3. Specifies that the voter-verified paper record shall be used as the official ballot for purposes of recounts or audits (Section 201(a)(1)(A)), and if there are sufficient inconsistencies to put an outcome in question, and sufficient paper ballot records are compromised, then the electronic vote tallies shall not be the only consideration.
4. Requires "in the event of the failure of voting equipment or circumstance that causes a significant disruption of the voting process for voters, that any voter waiting to cast a ballot shall be advised immediately of the individual's right to use an "emergency paper ballot" and be provided with one.
5. Testing protocols, results, and all communications between the test laboratory ad the manufacturer shall be provided to the EAC and to the public by the EAC.
6. New protections to ensure the accuracy and integrity of voter registration rolls and to safeguard against accidental removal of legal voters (Section 306) are implemented; and the procedures and protocols used to purge voters must be made public on the Internet.
7. Poll worker training is required, but not funded (Section 303) 8. Allocation of voting systems, poll workers, and election resources is required to be equitable, but there is no timely enforcement method. Reports are required by States to explain violations. (Section 299)
9. Campaign Activities are prohibited for Chief State Election Officials. (Section 305)
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