I will note at this point that we have, in our Request by Voters ( http://www.wethepatriots.org ) proposed an alternative solution to shift EAC responsibilities to the HAVA-created Standards Board, which unlike the EAC, is a truly representational body.
With the EAC in permanent control over voting system technologies and standards, the American people lose all control and decisionmaking authority over our elections. Any mandates we impose at our state or local levels are easily overridden by the EAC. And any action we may want to take against questionable electronic voting technology is mooted by the EAC, which is the final authority on what electronic voting technology is not only approved and recommended, but may actually be mandated in our cities and towns.
Just like the Gopher Bash (or Whack-a-Mole) arcade game, you can keep bashing the gophers, but they will keep popping up again. You can bash down DREs, and the EAC can pop them back up.
With an Executive Commission permanently controlling election systems, no matter what your local, state, or federal government may legislate, the EAC gopher can come up with its own voting system requirements whenever they want.
In other words, you can fight to amend Holt so it bans DREs, or you can knock down the technovote gopher in your own home states by passing laws requiring paper ballots and manual recounts, but the EAC can pop up those technovote gophers by writing contravening and contradictory requirements into their voting system guidelines.
The technovote gopher then becomes the law of your state if your state requires compliance with federal voting system guidelines, or if something like the Holt Bill comes along and just writes them into federal law, as it has done with the EAC-recommended text converter technology.
Consider this: Dixville Notch, NH has roughly 16 registered voters. They cast and count their ballots by hand. It might cost them under $100 to run their elections. They don’t need to worry about the EAC’s technovote gophers because they have no technology in their polling jurisdiction. Right?
Wrong.
In January 2007 Holt’s office, citing the EAC’s “voluntary” voting system requirement, inserted into its bill a mandate for an entirely new technological device to be used in every polling jurisdiction in the nation.
This ballot text converter, a scheme concocted by the EAC in 2005 against the advice of the Standards Board, may or may not even exist. Industry experts say it does not exist. Nonetheless, the Holt Bill mandates it for use in every polling place in the nation for the 2008 elections. Voila. The EAC's "voluntary" voting system guideline is now the law of the land. Presumably some industry maven will come up with something that is claimed to meet the requirement, and there goes another $4 billion of our American taxpayers money into more proprietary, nontransparent, undemocratic, but federally mandated voting system technology.
So where does Dixville Notch come up with the $6,000 initial investment for this device, and will it fit nicely, do you think, on top of their old wooden ballot box to “read back” the voter’s choices as prescribed by the EAC and Holt?
In March 2007 the EAC’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) had a lengthy discussion as to whether to use the language of “should” or “shall” regarding their new resolution for “accessibility of paper-based vote verification.” Their proposed resolution initially was drafted as follows:
“For the purpose of allowing voters to verify their ballot choices then the system should provide a mechanism that can read that record and generate an audio representation of its contents. The use of this system should be accessible to voters with dexterity disabilities.”
I don't want to spend too much time even going into the meaning of this particular TGDC resolution. But it would be irresponsible of me to not at least point out that it is "simply" requiring all paper-based voting systems to talk and be independently mobile (the paper ballot needs to get itself into the ballot box independent of the voter, who may have dexterity disabilities)...Hmmm...Do you think this is do-able or feasible in any economic, practical, or realistic way?
What I'd like us to focus on here is not the idea of a group of people (with little to no election experience) sitting around a DC office coming up with all sorts of pie in the sky ideas (just because they can), which our states, cities and towns can neither afford nor implement. I'd like to instead really take a close look at the decisionmaking process itself and what that means to the nation.
