But the nation remained distracted by hanging chads, and congressional magicians pulled HAVA's multibillion dollar e-voting coups out of their hats. Voila. America's elections were transformed in the blink of an eye.
From "Right to Vote" to "Opportunity to Verify a Voting Machine"
Technology-based elections are the keystone of HAVA. Through HAVA, K Street money modified elections for technology rather than voter needs. This continues to this day in nearly every proposal for post-HAVA federal election reform.
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the now normative vocabulary of election reform: "verifiable voting."
HAVA states that a voting system must "permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted."(xvi)
HAVA's language is significant. When a voter marks a paper ballot with pen or pencil, he has no need to "verify" his choice. A voter only needs to "verify" his vote when it has been marked and/or counted by a computer.
HAVA intent was to technologize America's elections, even down to the terminology used to define voters' rights, transforming our constitutional right to vote into the opportunity to verify a voting machine's vote, and turning voters and election officials into quality control agents for the e-voting industry. Removing elections from the public domain, verified voting now centralizes power in the hands of technology experts and private corporations using proprietary trade secret software to count our votes.
HAVA initiated an ongoing program of government grants to fund a cottage industry of computer scientists and statisticians devising elaborate protocols to support the "verifiability" and "auditability" of technology-based elections.
HAVA's anti-democratic notion of "verifiable voting" has even diverted many voting rights activists from the fundamental and core principles of democratic elections: publicly owned and operated, fully observable elections with citizen controls over every aspect of the voting system. Many grassroots activists are now fighting for the opportunity to verify and audit voting machines rather than the right for fair and open voting and vote counting.
Despite the inherently false premise of verifiable voting, it has become the clarion call for 21st century election reformers in congress, the EAC, and grassroots movements alike.
Secret Vote Counting: Touch screens and Optical Scanners
After HAVA rolled computerized touch screen machines into roughly 40% of America's polling places, reformers clamored for "voter verified paper audit trails"(VVPAT)(xvii).
This reform would send more money to the e-voting industry to attach printers to their touchscreen voting machines. The printers would then display a receipt-like printout to voters, who could look through a window and "verify" their vote.
But VVPAT, corporate controlled and proprietary, denies citizens the opportunity to oversee how their vote is being recorded and counted. Computer scientists remind us that a computer can easily be programmed to display one thing, record another, and count something altogether different. To make things worse, the display window in many of the VVPAT machines is inadequate for voters to even read the print out. Studies soon showed that between 10-20 percent of VVPAT paper records are unreadable and unusable for the purposes of "verifying" the votes in a recount. Other studies showed that only a very small percent of voters "verify" their vote in this manner.(xviii)
Ultimately, many VVPAT reformers abandoned the cause.
Today many reformers would willingly exchange all touch screen voting machines for optical scanners using voter marked paper ballots. I myself have, in the past, advocated for just such a solution as a great way to reintroduce voter marked paper ballots into every polling jurisdiction in the nation, itself a step in the right direction.
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