|
Iowa Ready To Take The First Step Toward Verified Voting |
|
|
|
|
By Sean Flaherty, Iowans for Voting Integrity
|
|
April 22, 2007 |
Iowa is on the verge of taking a long-overdue step, and joining the 27 states that have ended paperless voting. State Senate File 369 and its companion, House File 926, require that all direct-recording electronic voting machines offer a voter-verifiable paper record in time for the November 2008 elections. SF 369 passed the Senate 45-5 in late March, and HF 926 is expected to pass the House this week. Success should not be taken for granted, though: Iowans should contact their Representatives and urge them to pass HF 926.
The best news about these bills is that they phase out DREs altogether. When one of Iowa's 18 all-DRE counties seeks to replace its voting system, it must replace that system with an optical scan system, and use electronic ballot-marking devices to serve voters with disabilities. When one of the state's 60 blended-system counties replaces a DRE (blended counties use primarily optical scan with a DRE in each precinct for accessibility), the county must replace the DRE with an electronic ballot-marking device. The remaining 21 counties in Iowa already use optical scan balloting exclusively. Eventually, voter-marked paper ballots will be the uniform standard in Iowa.
The state will provide grants to counties to meet the bill requirements. The Assembly is expected to approve $4.5 million for counties to purchase DRE printers, optical scanners, or ballot-marking devices.
For now, counties have the choice of meeting the VVPR requirement by switching to optical scan now, or keeping DREs for the time being and just adding VVPR printers.
Hopefully, counties that are inclined to delay the switch to optical scan will wait to order reel-to-reel thermal VVPR printers until it clear that federal law will allow them to be used in federal elections; these printers would be banned under HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act.
HF 926 and SF 369 are an important step in the right direction, but voter-marked paper ballots are only the beginning of verified voting. Iowa still has no audit requirement, and as the Brennan Center's Task Force on Voting System Security observed last year, without an automatic routine audit, paper ballots are of questionable security value. Software disclosure, citizen access to election records, and limiting the role of vendors in administering elections are also essential to election integrity. Citizens and legislators in Iowa who want to ensure voter confidence and election integrity have much work ahead of them, but they may have something to celebrate by week's end.
Comment on This Article
You must login to leave comments...
Other Visitors Comments
There are no comments currently....
|
