Science Democrats Find Much Work Remains on Improving U.S. Voting Systems
(Washington, DC) The House Committee on Science today held a joint hearing with the Committee on House Administration to investigate the status and reliability of U.S. voting systems. Work in this area has been ongoing since the elections held in 2000.
“The development of new voting standards by NIST and the EAC was meant to improve the accuracy, reliability and integrity of our voting systems. However, the facts today highlight that these updated guidelines may have little impact when we need them – in the 2006 and 2008 elections,” stated Ranking Member Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN).
According to a June 2006 report by the GAO, eleven states are still using the 1990 Federal Election Commission (FEC) standards which are known to be inadequate. Twenty-nine states are using the 2002 FEC standards which GAO has also found to be weak; and currently, only five states plan on using the new 2005 standards developed by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) during the 2006 elections. Additionally, testing procedures to ensure that voting equipment meets any of these standards are not transparent.
“NIST has worked hard to develop new standards, but the revised EAC/NIST standards will not go into effect until December 2007. While these standards and test methods were being developed, states were already purchasing new voting equipment that may or may not comply,” added Rep. Gordon. “Many questions remain – on reliability, security, integrity of current equipment.”
In October 2002, The House Science Committee aided Congress in enacting the Help American Vote Act (HAVA, P.L. 107-522), to address many of the problems and weaknesses with the U.S. voting systems uncovered during the 2000 Presidential election. HAVA created a new federal agency, the EAC which set requirements for voting and voter-registration systems and provided federal funding without supplanting state and local control over election administration. Science Committee provisions ensured that the EAC would rely on the technical expertise of NIST.
Because the updated guidelines required by EAC will not go into effect until December 2007, HAVA stipulates that the existing FEC standards will serve as guidelines. These FEC guidelines, however, have been widely criticized with respect to their scope, approach, and effectiveness. In addition, there is not a transparent conformance testing procedure to ensure voting equipment actually meets the standards. Without stringent conformance testing, standards are meaningless.
UC Berkley Computer Science Professor Dr. David Wagner has done extensive work in the field of voting security and technology. “Many standards in the requirements are not tested and not enforced. The consequence is that the federal standards contain many requirements with no teeth,” noted Dr. Wagner in his testimony. He recommended that the government “reform the federal testing process to provide more transparency and openness.”
“I appreciate the work going into insuring the integrity of U.S. voting systems, but it is still unclear that the pace of this progress is going to do us any good any time soon,” concluded Rep. Gordon. “This is definitely an issue Democrats will continue to monitor closely.”
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