According to Soaries, this was not a qualitative analysis because the EAC did not have the authority to do qualitative analysis on state plans. That lack of authority was a result of the political process that produced HAVA. “In every chapter of HAVA there’s a compromise that makes no sense,” Soaries commented, “that you look at and say, ‘Boy, this is weird.’”
After the EAC verified that the plans had the needed components, the commission was required to publish them in the Federal Register for 45 days, at a cost to the cash-strapped commission of about $700,000. “What was so offensive is that the Federal Register is a publication owned by Congress,” Soaries said. “So watch this. Congress passes a law that requires publication in a publication that Congress owns, but passes a budget that does not provide money to do what Congress mandates. This is criminal! If Congress owns the Federal Register and we’re down the hall from the Federal Register, everyone wants to believe that this is all an oversight. So we went to Congress and said, ‘You should waive the fee,’ and they wouldn’t do it.”
The commission finally published the plans after spending several weeks coming up with the money to do so, and the funds were released to the states in July 2004. “Many of these states were waiting for money to prepare for November ’04,” Soaries said, “and Congress knew that.”
Although the states’ acquisition of new voting machines was the most pressing issue the EAC dealt with in its first year, Soaries emphasized that machines are not the whole story. “If the subject is the right to vote in a democracy, then machines and accessibility and information are all important,” he said. “If every machine works flawlessly but people don’t know where to go to vote, we have a problem. The EAC in history is the only commitment the federal government ever made to do anything about [improving election administration], and that commitment is as shallow as a dry brook.”
Soaries stuck it out through the November election, then resigned from the EAC in April 2005. House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer issued a statement on the occasion of the resignation, challenging the Bush administration and Congress to “seriously consider Mr. Soaries’ observations as we develop the Fiscal Year 2006 budget.”
“Who Promotes Democracy?”
Soaries made it clear that neither party was supporting election reform during his tenure at the EAC. “There was no resounding protest from the Democrats to any of this,” he pointed out. “There was silence and complicity. Why? At its core it’s because members of Congress in their heart of hearts believe that, with all of the flaws and problems and mishaps, the system cannot be too bad because it produced them. American democracy has been swallowed up by American politics.”
The electoral process is increasingly dominated by political consultants, Soaries said. “Their job is not to promote democracy but to promote the candidate, by producing your base supporters in larger numbers than your opponent. The strategy of choice has two objectives: I want my people to vote and I want yours not to. Politics by definition requires a form of voter suppression.”
If politics is all about bringing out your own base while suppressing your opponent’s, Soaries asked, “Who promotes democracy?”
The EAC Since Soaries
Since Soaries left the EAC, Congress has released the funds necessary for it to fulfill its mandate under HAVA. The commission has also become much more partisan, many voting rights activists charge. Steve Carbó, senior program director in the democracy program at Demos, a national public-policy organization, said in a February 2007 interview that Soaries “wasn’t willing to play the political games that go on in Washington. He never assumed a traditionally partisan role in his work on the commission.”
Rolling Stone magazine asked Soaries whether there were any attempts to politicize the EAC during his tenure. Early on there was an attempt, Soaries answered, but “the one time I got a call from the White House trying to invade this space, I pushed back, and they never called again.” People at the White House apparently thought that “because I was a Republican . . . I cared more than I did about Republican politics,” he told Rolling Stone.
HAVA authorized the EAC only through 2005. Since then, Carbó said, the commission’s longevity has been an “open question.” A provision in an election reform bill now in Congress (H.R. 811, called the Holt Bill) would extend the commission’s authorization, and the Carter-Baker Commission on election reform recommends greater rulemaking authority for the EAC. These developments worry some voting rights activists.
“If you had asked me two years ago whether giving the EAC rulemaking authority is a good idea, I would have said yes without reservation,” Carbó said. But now he worries that the commission will use its authority to further partisan or political ends and feels that the EAC can serve the voters only if both the president and Congress are willing to put aside political interests in the appointment of commissioners and in appropriations for its operation.
Problems in election administration didn’t begin with the hanging-chads debacle; rather, Florida 2000 opened a window on an already broken electoral system and opened the door to initiatives that threaten to harm it even more. EAC oversight, electronic voting machines, stricter voter ID rules, consolidation of statewide voter lists—all are outcomes of HAVA that may have been proposed with good intentions but that can make way for less transparency in elections and for disfranchisement of eligible voters. “Elections should be fair and consistent,” Ingrid Reed, director of the New Jersey Project for the Eagleton Institute of Politics, said in a February 2007 interview. “We should know what the rules are, and we should be sure election administrators are following them. That’s what Buster was concerned about and is concerned about. This system is not one he feels is reliable.”
This article originally appeared in the ePistle, the online newsletter of Evangelicals for Social Action. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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