Millions of Americans have lost faith in the electoral process, and the federal Election Assistance Commission is trying to figure out how to win back their confidence.
It’s slow, detailed work, and painful to watch. The commission held hearings in Denver last week. The recitation of figures, acronyms and legal citations was mind-numbing.
One actual quote, used here anonymously to avoid unnecessary embarrassment to the person who said it: “The VVSG require a DRE with a VPAT.”
Translation: The proposed voluntary voting system guidelines require a digitally recording electronic voting device with a verifiable paper audit trail.
Even spelled out, that sentence still presents a riddle. Skeptics’ demands for a paper record of votes are at odds with the goal of more accessibility for the disabled. A paper trail does nothing for the visually impaired. And if you read back their votes to them, their ballot isn’t secret anymore.
The Election Assistance Commission was created as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress in 2002 after the interminable and still stubbornly disputed presidential election of 2000. I was part of a citizens’ committee in 2002 that was supposed to help inform Coloradans about HAVA. The committee never settled on a focus, and the names – all the “helping” and “assisting” – seemed suspiciously paternalistic.
That’s something many disabled voters are concerned about, too. They’re frustrated that current equipment doesn’t let them vote without assistance – “Most of my voting has been done by somebody else,” said one blind advocate – yet there’s no single system that will accommodate every disability.
Donetta Davidson, former Colorado secretary of state and the newest member of the EAC, asked if the disabled might ever agree on a voting system.
Unlikely, said Lee Page of the Paralyzed Veterans of America. “Herding cats,” he called it.
Accommodating the disabled was a major goal of HAVA. The paper trail wasn’t. It was demanded later, by citizen critics, and “it has taken on a life of its own,” said Johnnie F. McLean, a North Carolina elections official.
She also observed that “many people see that our elections process is broken.”
“Confidence” was the word of the day.
The big problem with election shenanigans used to be that votes were being counted that shouldn’t be. Now it’s the opposite: votes aren’t being counted that should be.
The commission’s vice chairman, Paul DeGregorio, extrapolated from recent polling that 7 million people have lost all confidence in the elections process.
“The confidence meter of the American public, for whatever reason, seems to be moving in the wrong direction,” added Commissioner Ray Martinez III.
There was a lot of that kind of talk. But Bob Terwilliger, a Washington state elections official who audited that state’s incredibly close, back-and-forth governor’s election in 2004 (it ended up a 134-vote difference), says all the controversy at least has gotten the public “interested, energized and involved.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Disputed elections also have gotten a lot of the public angry and suspicious, but you couldn’t tell that from the disappointing turnout at the EAC’s public hearing Wednesday at a downtown Denver hotel. Only about a third of the chairs were occupied. And, over a seven-week period, the commission received only 141 public comments on its proposed guidelines.
Maybe the public’s apparent lack of interest in fixing something it doesn’t like shows the depth of distrust of the system. Or maybe it’s just laziness. Or it may be that the hearings process, with all those obscure details, isn’t designed to accommodate ordinary people with regular lives.
The news out of the hearing was that the commission adopted, 4-0, an initial set of procedures for federal certification of voting systems. It’s still many steps away from a solution. It’s apparent that restoring confidence will take longer and require more new technology than the voting public might like.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists.
