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| The EAC - Another Failure To Follow Their Mandates |
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| By John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org and VoteTrustUSA | |
| March 18, 2006 | |
 "The Election Assistance Commission is intended to serve as a national clearinghouse and resource for the compilation of information and procedures on election administration.""Assessing security and reliability issues and determining their pervasiveness are items that EAC can explore and share in its role as a clearinghouse for information on problems with electronic voting systems." ELECTIONS: Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way but Key Activities Need to Be Completed, Government Accountability Office (GAO-05-956) In October, 2004 VotersUnite sent a letter to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) volunteering to assist them in setting-up a "consumer union network" of voting administrative issues, including voting systems failures. Thus, counties could be notified immediately, via the network, of any problems, solutions, or ideas from anywhere else in the country. This sharing of information, we thought, was one of the reasons the EAC was formed. To date, VotersUnite has received no response to that letter, or to emails sent to people at the EAC who said they would help get an answer. Last year the Government Accountability Office presented the report, cited above, to Congress. This report identified that the EAC was to be a clearinghouse of information and that the EAC had failed to fully take this job on. The report also identified VotersUnite as a non-governmental information clearinghouse. This brings us to last week. On March 09, 2006, the Akron Beacon Journal reported that officials in Summit County Ohio had found a 30% failure rate on memory cards while testing their Election Systems and Software (ES&S) M-100 Optical Scan voting machines. Upon reading the article this correspondent contacted the reporter, Lisa A. Abraham, and asked whether she had asked ES&S if they had contacted other states who might have the same machines. She responded that she had, in fact, asked that question but had never received an answer. The news reports from the next day told that the incidence of memory card failures was improving and that the failure rate of replacement cards was now only 10%. On March 10, an article reported that ES&S felt the problem was only with memory cards received from them in "recent" weeks and "no other county in Ohio or throughout the country has complained of failing cards." Then on March 16, Elections Officials in North Carolina announced that they had 1,000 memory cards with problems like the ones found in Summit Co. plus, for the first time we learned that low or dead batteries were not the only problems. The memory cards supplied to Summit Co. and to North Carolina also have read-back errors. In fact, the read-back errors are the cause of two-thirds of the errors. It must be noted that the only reason North Carolina knew there was a problem with the ES&S memory cards is that state law requires voting machine vendors to contact the state when there is a problem anywhere with any of their voting equipment. Knowing that the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) was formed, in part, to be a clearinghouse of information for elections officials and voters, I contacted them to find out what they knew about bad memory cards and what action they were going to take to ensure all ES&S customers were notified of the problem. In my email to the EAC Spokeswoman, I asked, in part: "In view of the fact that the EAC is supposed to be a clearinghouse of information such as this failure information, has the EAC done anything at all to ensure that ES&S notifies all of their customers of this failure? We are into primary election time. There were failures of voting equipment in Texas last week. Some of that equipment was ES&S though the bigger failures were on Hart Intercivic systems. Someone should ensure that all ES&S customers are made aware of the failure of memory cards and that they are all tested or recalled. Will the EAC do that?" The next day I received this response: Mr. Gideon,This carefully worded response tells me that ES&S has very probably only contacted Summit Co., OH and North Carolina; "these customers". In fact, I took the time to do the EAC's job for them and I contacted a few states that have May primaries and that use M-100 optical scan machines. The people in state elections offices that I talked to were not aware of the problem and, in fact, they were not surprised that ES&S didn't contact them. The second sentence of this short response is a startling example of the way in which the EAC is continuing to neglect the responsibilities assigned to it by Congress. The issue is not a "certification" question; it is a question of whether or not the EAC is acting as a clearinghouse for information. It is a question of whether counties, who may not be told by vendors, are informed that they need to test their memory cards. It is a question of whether the EAC is seriously attempting to do its job or simply finding another excuse as to why they can't do it. Comment on This Article
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