Documenting chain of custody, while an admirable goal in any election system, is a costly process, which poses many unanswered questions. Under HR811 , the states will need to come up with this process and all the costs associated with it, all without a state plan process to do so intelligently. States will require additional staffing and poll workers in order to follow the chain of custody not just with ballots but with the software configuration side. On the software side of things, states will need to allocate qualified personnel and somehow find a way to make the entire vendor process accessible to those personnel.
Auditing and Reporting to The Commission
This technelection bill mandates rather complex, time consuming, and labor intensive auditing and reporting protocols. The protocols described in HR811, however, provide little, if any, value to improving election integrity, as shown in a simulation of the HR811 auditing protocols recently done by Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. You can read about that here.
Because HR811 requires audits to be done in situ at the polling place where the ballots are stored, staff needs to be found to oversee and properly manage the audits. States may need to add statisticians at both the jurisdiction and state levels to reconcile audit results, and to complete the reports – each of which require states to report on at least fourteen data points multiplied by at least four different types of votes cast - in a manner timely to ensure the state’s ability to certify election results within constitutional time tables.
Just like the certification mandate, with the audit and reporting requirements, this technoelection bill requires states to develop yet another entirely new function.
So what are the costs of an entirely new audit and reporting function?
At a minimum, states will need to finance their new department’s most basic needs, such as:
- Overhead and administration: The certification department will require offices and everything that goes into maintaining those offices.
- Staffing: The certification department will require highly skilled professionals, including management, accounting, statistician, and administrative personnel.
- Temporary Help: During election periods, the audit office will need to hire enough accounting, management, and statistical professionals to conduct dispersed audits at all the required locations, ensure proper reconciliation and reporting, and manage the entire process.
HR 811 No thanks!
The outcomes of passing HR811 are as far removed from its stated goals as are the outcomes of the Patriot Act. Want a little homeland security? Sure, just give up a bunch of your civil rights. Want a little paper trail in your elections? Sure, just turn your elections over to private industry and the white house, and cripple your local economies to boot.
We can do better than this. And we will. Contact your representatives in Washington D.C. and tell them "NO THANKS TO HR811"
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