d. Restrictions should not be imposed by proprietary claims, nor shall removal of access to information be placed outside of governmental custody.
3) SUNSET THE ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION (EAC) - The EAC was established in the Help America Vote Act to help implement the Act through 2006. There is no longer any meaningful purpose in continuing to fund and maintain the EAC.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1) ACCOUNTABILITY STUDY - We recommend a comprehensive GAO report to assess HAVA, monies spent and disbursed, and subsequent end results. This report will provide an analysis of vote tabulation systems including both hand-counted paper ballot and electronic systems (such as DRE touch screen and optical scan). This report will also include a study of the applicability of e-voting products for the nation's election systems, and the efficacy of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Certification program.
2) CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - We recommend a congressional committee to study the election crisis and hold public hearings. This special committee would work closely with a 50-state representational task force including state and/or local election officials, and an equal number of individuals and representatives from interested citizen groups. This committee would issue a report recommending state-based electoral reforms.
New information available since the original introduction of H.R. 550 includes the following:
" Discoveries by computer security experts that the nation's e-voting systems are vulnerable to unacceptably high rates of failure as well as unacceptable exposure to the insertion of malicious programming.
" Evidence that software can be configured to create an electronic recording of a result that is different from that shown on the "paper trail" generated from a printer attached to a DRE.
o The Election Science Institute (ESI) study of Cuyahoga County, Ohio's primary election showed 1.4% of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) cartridges exhibited missing ballots; 16.9% of VVPAT tapes showed a discrepancy of one to five votes between the tally of ballots and the electronically recorded results; and 2.1% showed a discrepancy of over 25 votes.
o In the same ESI study, team members discovered that of 40 VVPAT tapes, 9.6% were either destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or otherwise compromised.
o In Denver County, Colorado VVPATs contained gibberish instead of legitimate voter choices, and that printer jams rendered VVPAT unsuitable for use in recounts or audits.
o Doug Jones, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Iowa, testified that paper trails are sufficiently unreadable that only a small fraction of voters can actually view them.
oAdditionally, the use of DREs routinely disenfranchises voters, through DRE failure, or just because the limited availability of DREs per jurisdiction is a cause of long voter lines and limited access to voting.
" Evidence that the e-voting solutions implemented to address voter disabilities do not do so. Providing an accessible voting system for persons with disabilities was a major rationale for HAVA. Noel Runyan, an accessibility engineer, testified in the Colorado lawsuit that none of the major voting system vendors' VVPAT systems met federal disability requirements, particularly for voters with visual disabilities.
" Preliminary recommendations by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to universally decertify paperless and paper trail technologies in the federal 2007 voting system guidelines, citing the non-auditability and high risk factors for DRE touch screens. Legislation supporting investment in a voting technology that is soon to be obsolete, and is proven insecure, is fiscally irresponsible.
" Statistical evidence that audits of only 2% of all precincts, as recommended in HR 550, even if properly executed, fail to catch misdeeds or mistabulations by voting machines. The H.R. 550 audit language further fails to address even the most fundamental procedural issues. Election night parallel hand-count verifications offer a better solution than relying exclusively on post-election audits. Accessible and financially feasible recounts provide security and integrity for a given voting system.
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