In 2002, in response to the Florida election debacle of 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA). HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to distribute federal largesse for new voting machines and to oversee such reforms as "provisional voting." Four EAC Commissioners were appointed in 2003 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate late last December.
By mid-January, 2004, however, the EAC still had no permanent offices or budget, the commissioners had no letterhead stationery, and, most important, it didn't have the hundreds of thousands of dollars it needs to publish in the Federal Register a compendium of state election reform plans that the HAVA requires to be published before the millions of dollars for new voting equipment can be disbursed to the states.
Additionally, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), which HAVA says is supposed to advise the EAC on updating the Federal Voting Systems Standards (FVSS) for which it is now responsible, doesn't have the half-million dollars it needs to fund this work.
At the same time that the EAC, responsible for upgrading the voting infrastructure of tens of millions of voters in every state, is depending on the kindness of strangers for its essential resources, the Pentagon is blithely spending $22 million dollars to design, build and use an advanced remote Internet voting system it hopes will be used by 200,000 overseas voters but which an independent survey shows may only be used by fewer than 20,000, perhaps only by 10,000, voters.
The Pentagon's UVS (for "UOCAVA [Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act] Voting System")/SERVE is a follow-on to its "Voting Over the Internet" pilot program of 2000, which provided 84 voters with a chance to vote online at a total cost of $6.2 million, or around $73,000 each.
The general contractor for the UVS project is accenture (formerly Arthur Anderson Consulting). VeriSign, disliked by many for what are seen as self-serving policies that threaten "the security and stability of the Internet," is in charge of identification and authentication services for UVS. The system will work only on Windows-compliant computers.
The only justification offered by the Pentagon for needing a UVS at all is its own failure to master the logistics of delivering and collecting absentee paper ballots for its troops. Given that the Pentagon is justly renowned for its ability to deliver cruise missiles, tanks, fighter planes, jet fuel, food, and medical supplies anywhere in the world in massive quantifies at a moment's notice, it's hard to understand why, if it really wanted to, it couldn't get paper ballots to its soldiers wherever they are, allow them to fill them out, and return them where they have to go in the States in an expeditious manner.
The biggest problem with UVS, however, is the fact that it cannot be properly certified. All voting systems in the U.S. need to meet the standards set out in the FVSS. Unfortunately, these standards contain no provision for remote Internet voting systems, such as UVS. Unfazed, the Pentagon has said it will certify UVS according to standards of its own choosing. Maybe these will be good standards, and maybe the UVS will meet them, but that's not the point. The UVS needs to be certified according to the FVSS, and, at present, it can't be.
Unless, of course, the FVSS are upgraded to address remote Internet voting. NIST is supposed to help EAC do this, but its funding is tied up in Congress. Adding remote Internet voting criteria to the FVSS would allow competitors to create UVS-like systems for domestic use and would allow the UVS itself to be properly tested and certified.
Until that happens, and until the EAC is fully funded, along with its essential NIST advisors, an aggressive program to help the troops vote using absentee paper ballots should be instituted, and SERVE should be stopped.
Copyright © 2004 by Marc Strassman. All rights reserved.
