Slaughter takes a stand on the voting bill
The Politico’s Crypt blog has an interesting story about Slaughter’s unusual opposition to certain aspects of the electronic voting bill now before the house:
Democratic leaders ran into a speed bump within their own caucus this week over legislation requiring states and other municipalities to maintain printed records for paper-less electronic voting machines by 2008.
The speed bump in this case was a pretty big one: Democrats on the powerful Rules Committee, who aired their opposition to the bill during an open committee hearing Wednesday.
This is remarkable because the Rules Committee is historically the speaker’s most important tool in crafting legislation. In fact, the speaker used to chair the committee before Congress changed the rules in the early part of the 20th Century. And it is rare for the committee chair, who is now chosen by the speaker, to openly oppose legislation cleared for the floor by leadership.
(snip)
Slaughter also voiced concern that the bill did not require counties to establish nonpartisan voting boards. At one point, she said, “I am scared we are walking off a cliff here, and I’m worried about it.”
In New York State, every county has an election commissioner from each party. And, even though we have some of the nastiest races in the country, there’s rarely much controversy over the results of elections (not never, but rarely). The reason is simple: people trust a system that is overseen by members of both parties. Having bipartisan voting boards in each county seems like a no-brainer to me.
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You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, but then it’s too late. You go Louise!
People also trust the existing voting machines in NY because they are nearly tamper-proof. When was the last time you heard that about an electronic voting system?
And by the way, do you trust ATMs? Have you ever had a problem where your money disappeared? In over 20 yaers of using ATMs, I have never had a problem that I didn’t cause … when I withdraw money, the bank and I know exactly how much I withdrew. When I deposit money, the bank and I know exactly how much money I deposited. This is high accuracy and high security electronic transactions. Why can’t our voting systems achieve this level of accuracy and security?
I know why … our political leaders didn’t have the political will or desire to require and enforce these levels of accuracy and security, and up until a few months ago, those political leaders had an R associated with them. Let’s hope that the new political leaders that have a D associated with them have the will to require high levels of accuracy and security.
Part of the deal with ATMs is that we know we can check our balance later to catch mistakes. There’s no record of who you specifically voted for when you vote.
For voting, you don’t need to know which voter voted for which candidate. You simply need to be able to verify the total votes for each candidate. This is a less strict requirement on accuracy than an ATM has. If it can be done for ATMs, it certainly can be done for electronic voting. A paper audit trail can be made sufficiently secure and accurate. It can be done. It can be done. It can be done.
I know it can be done, but I think that, unlike with ATMs, you need to make each voter to look at a paper receipt of their vote to verify it.
I’m going to reprint a letter I wrote to the Ann Applebaum (a truly dreadful columnist) after she wrote a column about how we should all just trust Diebold.
———————Letter follows——–
Dear Ms. Applebaum,
Your recent editorial (”In ATMs, Not Votes, We Trust”) makes very little sense. For starters, ATM and credit card transactions are not anonymous, so it is easy to check if the transaction went the way it was supposed to. Since voting is anonymous, there is no way to check if your vote went the way that you wanted without looking at the actual ballot before handing it in.
Let’s suppose that you took money out of your bank account at an ATM and that when you checked your account a few days later there seemed to be much less money in the account that you had thought there would be. You tried talking to the bank but found out that they couldn’t tell you how much money you had withdrawn, they could only tell you the total amount of money withdrawn from the bank on that day. That’s how voting works, Ms. Applebaum. You can only see the totals for a precinct, you have no way of knowing anything about your individual vote and how it was processed.
To take it one step further, let’s suppose that you had no way of checking on your own individual transactions, that someone had been sending out letters and flyers to your bank’s customers giving them incorrect information about where the ATMS were located and who was allowed to use them (as someone did with polling places in Cleveland and in Milwaukee), that the CEO of the company that manufactured the ATMs said he was committed to bankrupting you (the CEO of Diebold said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president”), and that your bank’s ATMs no longer gave receipts. Wouldn’t you be a little bit worried?
Before I read your editorial, I was fairly confident that the November 2 elections were fair and legitimate. Now that I’ve thought about your analogy with ATMs, I’m not so sure.
Voters checking the piece of paper may be a weak link, however, you can put as much security in place as is possible to ensure confidence in the voting apparatus and procedures that officials must follow. That’s really what this is about. Those measures of security don’t exist or are minimal. Votes right now can disappear into the electronics and we have no way of knowing. We need to prevent this as much as possible, despite the fact that there is a weak link in the chain (the voter). It would be much harder for someone to steal an election if they knew that most voters will check to see that their votes are properly recorded, compared to now where the proper technology apparently can make votes disappear into the machine.
I’d be thrilled if I thought that the machines and procedures were very very secure, and the only thing that could go wrong is when the voters don’t carefully check the paper record of their votes. That would be a huge step forward from where we are now.
By the way, I believe that most people who take the time to vote will take the time to verify that their vote is properly recorded if given the opportunity.
Exile, in both of your comments here, you just don’t sound very enthusiastic about securing our voting machines and procedures.
To the contrary, I’m very enthusiastic about this, but we have to make the most trusted system possible. We need paper receipts, first of all. But we also need the public to trust the people who run the system. Part of the reason I trust the system here because there is a Democratic election commissioner as well as a Republican one. The whole country should have this system. In the end, some of our faith in any system involves faith in the people who run it. There’s just no way around that.
I hate to quote Reagan approvingly, but the expression “Trust, but verify” applies here. I need to be able to trust my election commissioners and to be able to verify that my vote went through the way I wanted.
According to Bradblog they have been considering an amendment to ban DRE’s altogether. Louise has been getting lots of calls to allow it to come forward. I don’t know what chance it would have for passage, but it is important for the calls to continue to show how important this is.
LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER, NY - CHAIRWOMAN (D)
Phone:(202) 225-3615
Fax: (202) 225-7822
When Slaughter uses the term nonpartisan, I’m assuming she means bipartisan? In other words, just because you have a Democrat and Republican commissioner, doesn’t meant the BOE is nonpartisan. Its just partisan towards both the Dem and Rep parties. I don’t mean to come across as being a stickler (bipartisan makes sense to me), I just want to confirm whether this is what she means.
I read through the comments quickly, but they’re kind of long. Can you refresh my mind on what the acronym DRE stands for?
DRE means “direct-recording electronic”. I was also wondering what Slaughter meant, if she meant bipartisan, which assume she does.
My main point is the following: technology is not a magic bullet. In the end, some group oversees elections and it hast to be a group that voters trust. Which means that it represents more than one party.
Last week sometime someone was criticizing her because of her voting record of supporting Dem’s - I said it then and I’ll say it forever - she is OUR GIFT!
She always does us proud - Thanks again Louise! (and again, and again, and again…)