<html><body><P>American Enterprise Institute</P> <P>March 9, 2007</P> <P>[Edited transcript from audio tapes]</P> <P> <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>8:30 a.m. </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>9:00  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText><STRONG>Panel I: The Lessons from November</STRONG></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Panelists</EM>:   </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Rick Hasen, Loyola Law School</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Gracia Hillman, Election Assistance Commission</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Todd Rokita, Indiana secretary of state</DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Moderator</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>John C. Fortier, AEI</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Keynote Speaker</EM>: </DIV></TD> <TD>Congressman Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.)</TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>11:00</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>   </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText><STRONG>Panel II: What s Brewing for Election Reform?</STRONG></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Panelists</EM>:</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Doug Chapin, Electionline.org</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Zachary Goldfarb, <EM>Washington Post</EM></DIV></DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Thomas Mann, The Brookings Institution</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>  </DIV></DIV></TD> <TD></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText><EM>Moderator</EM>:</DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Norman J. Ornstein, AEI</DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>  </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>12:30</DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment</DIV></DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText> </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Proceedings:</P> <P><BR>Panel I: The Lessons from November</P> <P>(Discussion in progress)</P> <P>John Fortier:  ---Brookings series of panels, the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project has a panel.  The keynote speaker, Mr. Ehlers from Congress and a second panel following that looking at the 2006 elections; not the results of those elections but how those elections were run.  How far have we come since Florida in 2000?  How have we done with the Help America Vote Act in 2002?  How has that implemented over the past four years?  And then in the later part of the conference, looking to the future.  Where are we heading in election reform issues?  </P> <P>We have an impressive set of panels today.  We will start introducing our panel here today.  I will start to my right with Gracia Hillman who is Commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission since December 2003, or since the very beginning.  She has served as chairman of that commission and prior to that--her time on the commission was executive director of the League of Women Voters, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation.  </P> <P>Then we have Todd Rokita, who is the secretary of state of Indiana, the chief election officer of that state.  He was elected by other secretaries of state to serve on the Executive Board of the Election Assistance Commission Standards Board.  And with Indiana, a number of interesting developments in particular a new voter identification law.  We would like to hear how that is working and other developments in Indiana as well as with his work with the National Association of Secretaries of State, a broader, national perspective.  </P> <P>And then on the end we have gearing up his PowerPoint presentation--that is Rick Hasen who is the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.  He is a recognized expert on election law, is co-editor of the Election Law Journal, which is one of our great academic resources on election law; also a co-editor of a case book as well with Dan Lowenstein.  He is also the editor of a recent book, The Supreme Court and Election Law: Judging the Quality from Baker v. Carr to Bush v. Gore published at NYU press in 2003.  Let me go in order that we have introduced.  We will start with Gracia Hillman; we will move to Secretary Rokita and then to Rick Hasen.</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  Thank you so much and good morning to everybody.  Before I begin, let me introduce my colleagues; at least I certainly see one, the chair of the EAC for 2007. Commissioner Donetta Davidson is here in the back of the room. And, Donetta, I cannot tell if our colleagues are here yet -- no?  Right.  We had this week two commissioners to start, Commissioner Caroline Hunter and Commissioner Rodriguez.  They were recently appointed and began their work with the Commission this week and they will be joining us later.  </P> <P>Lessons learned from November:  Many, many discussion about this and I think it would be fair to say that every person who is engaged in the election process has learned a lesson this year, and if you spoke with 500 people you would probably hear at least 450 different lessons learned.  We are going through a transformation; every industry has gone through some major transformation at some point in its existence.  And that elections are going through such a major transformation at this point in its existence in this country is very significant.  </P> <P>In 2000 there was a demand for change from the public, and the public would include academics and political and public officials as well as individual voters.  Congress accepted some responsibility to legislate that change and assigned a fair amount of that responsibility to the states and to the Election Assistance Commission and to the Department Of Justice for enforcement.  And if you look at the kind of changes that were legislated and have been implemented since 2003 and you look at it in the context of any kind of radical transformation, there would be nothing new here.  </P> <P>What is different, however, is that there is almost no tolerance right now for the kind of time it takes to get things right.  The kind of change that was legislated by the Help America Vote Act was huge.  It not only included new systems that had not previously been widely tested; it included changes to develop statewide voter registration databases, which was a new activity for most of the states, if not 49 of the 50; and that was a huge project.  It was a huge, huge database project.  Any large organization that has been through a huge database change would appreciate that, and the fact that this database had to interface with local jurisdictions and other governmental organizations helps to magnify that.  So we should not be surprised that it would take more than three years.  Even if everything had begun right away after the Help America Vote Act had been signed, expecting that all of that could be transformed, in place and finely tuned in three years was, perhaps, a bit shortsighted.  And lessons learned---I mean, that is clearly a lesson learned.  </P> <P>I think I will approach lessons learned from the four different levels, starting with the national level; for America, in general, what worked?  Clearly, increased awareness and increased dialogue and increased press coverage about all matters relating to election administration was a good thing for America.  I also personally think it is a good thing for America that we would use this time now to find a way for technology to enhance the way we conduct elections.  Now some of my colleagues, and myself included, we are not always pleased with the reports that come out in the media because I think some of it was very, very confusing to the electorate.  Most people want to be able to, A, know how to register to vote; B, know where to go to vote - walk into a polling place or request and exercise their absentee ballot or otherwise just vote without having to feel like they need to know 10 or 12 steps to be able to exercise their vote.  Hopefully, at the end of this transformation process, voters will have that level of comfort.  But right now, because there is so much discussion, I think a lot of voters are stepping back and saying Well, wait a minute.  Perhaps there is more going on here than I realized.   And so instead of the comfort level increasing the way we all hoped it would at this point in time, it has either stagnated and, maybe, in some cases dipped.  </P> <P>So the challenges that remain are for the Election Assistance Commission and the states to work with its NGO partners and legislators - federal legislators and state legislators - to really capture what works well and what is not working well, whether it means that people feel that voting systems are not as robust and durable as they need to be; the issue of every ballot cast having a verifiable paper record, a voter-verifiable paper record; or whether it means various aspects like provisional voting being implemented in a way that does not confuse voters or otherwise put voters in a position of not understanding when and how their votes get cast and counted.</P> <P>We need to capture what works.  We need to look at what is not working for all of America and continue pushing.  For state and local jurisdictions, obviously, what helped them were the resources that Congress brought to the table; and what also helped them were their experience and their commitment to their work.  But the amount of change they had to manage was incredible and I think it stressed the system in many ways.  </P> <P>On the other hand, we have now election officials who are trained and doing their work differently.  But the challenges remain to work out the kinks and fully implement it, and, of course, it makes them ever so nervous to think that just as they are fine-tuning what they implemented in the past three years, there may be a new way of reform coming.  And I m sure we will hear more about that later, but that can be pretty daunting to figure out just what are the implications and what are the timelines.  </P> <P>With respect to non-governmental organizations, I do not want to appear to be jaded but I m not sure what really worked for the NGO groups in the past three years with respect to election reform.  I certainly appreciate what worked with respect to access to voting for persons with disabilities but I think that the non-governmental organizations in general - and I do not mean every single one of them, but in general - have signaled a high level of dissatisfaction with either the type of reform that is in place or the way that the reform has been managed.  And for individual voters, lots and lots of tools in place to protect votes.  Increased voter education; voting systems that presumably would be more efficient to cut down on the length of time a person has to wait in line; tools like provisional voting; administrative complaint procedures.  </P> <P>But all of this is only as useful as the knowledge that the voter has that these things exist, and it is an awful lot for a voter to absorb in a two-or-three-year period of time, and so I think it does lend to some confusion.  It puts a lot of responsibility, but, I think, rightfully so, on organizations like the Election Assistance Commission, organizations that include the Secretaries of State, local election officials and others including the nongovernmental organizations to really do the kind of voter education that clarifies where we are with this.  </P> <P>I think, perhaps, the lesson learned from this past November for individual voters is that too much information lent to more confusion with respect to what is working and what is not working.  And I think the highly contentious and emotionally charged debate over the types of voting systems used really did make voters feel that the system in the main is not improving.  What benefit is it to me as a voter if the system I m using is high-tech and it has bells and whistles and it works and it can count votes in 10 minutes if I do not believe that the integrity of the process has been maintained?  And I think that is an unfair perception but it is going to take a while to work through all of this for the voters to be able to separate concerns about the types of voting systems, the durability, the efficacy of those systems to give the EAC and others a chance to really test all of these processes out and to also resolve conflicting interests.  </P> <P>There are many conflicting interests between all the various groups that are engaged in this process and it is going to take time. And I understand voters do not want to wait until 2010 and 2012 when there is going to be an early mandate.  But there were good lessons learned.  Whether they captured what worked well, whether they codified the challenges that remain, 2006 in the main worked fairly well for the United States with respect to voting.  Thank you.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Thank you, John, and thank you, Gracia.  As I move forward making some remarks on behalf of not only the National Association of Secretaries of State but, also, and separately as Indiana Secretary of State, I want to take just a minute and introduce Leslie Reynolds, who is the Executive Director of NASS, the National Association of Secretaries of State.  She is the secretaries eyes and ears on the Hill when we are not here, and most of the time our mouth as well.  </P> <P>So, Leslie, good morning.  Thank you for being here.  With respect to the EAC and former Chair Hillman, I want to also publicly say that - and this is on behalf of the Secretaries of State - a lot of times the secretaries are in very good alignment with what the EAC is doing and its initiatives, and sometimes we are not. But at all times we have all benefited from and appreciated an America---and the voting public and the tax payers have benefited from the professionalism of the EAC, and I thank you Gracia and the EAC for that. </P> <P>I have formulated my remarks into some of the positives and negatives from 2006.  I absolutely do not believe - and I do not believe any secretary of state in this country believes - that our election system is broken.  I think the elections that we have had recently involving the new technology, putting 21st century practices to our process has resulted in the most accurate, accessible and fair elections this country and - although I do not have data to back that up - the world has ever seen.  For some reason, we have got on this thing where an electoral process in this country has be textbook-perfect.  And before you draw your judgments, let me explain my definition of the word perfect in that last sentence by saying what elections have not been in the history of this republic or the world.  And that is we have never seen a perfect election because at every one of our elections, humans have been involved and, at least, by biblical definition of the word human, we are not perfect; therefore our elections cannot be perfect.  But they have to be fair and they have to be accurate.  And what I mean by that is that if something goes awry at a precinct - a battery fails on a piece of voting equipment that, by definition, results in an imperfect election.  </P> <P>But what matters is do the poll workers know what the back-up process procedure was?  Was it utilized?  And every state has those back-up procedures built right into its law or its regulations.  And were the voters afforded access to that backup procedure?  And the example of a voting system failure - a battery dying.  And that is what I mean by fair and accurate.  And then if a problem occurred, it did not just occur in a predominantly African-American precinct or it did not happen to voters who were all women.  That certainly would be unfair and inaccurate and inaccessible.  </P> <P>But what we should be judging all of this on is did the election afford an equal opportunity across voters, across the jurisdiction, to exercise their franchise?  And if you look at the electoral process in that context, through that lens, which is a reasonable and fair lens---again, as long as humans are going to be involved in putting on the election, then you will find, certainly, undeniably that our processes these days are much better, much more transparent, much more accessible, much more focused upon than they ever have been in our history.  And if we are going to be responsible as voters, as citizens of a free society, then we owe it to each other, we owe it to our fellow citizens to point this out to the media, to remind ourselves of what we need to do to improve the process; make it even more fair, more accurate, more accessible.  Strive always, as we do as humans, for that goal of perfection but knowing that if we continue on the track that I have at least seen over the last couple of years ever since Florida 2000, then all we are going to do at the end of the day is completely destroy and keep humiliating voter confidence, and we need to be building up voter confidence.  </P> <P>Prior to Election Day November 6th, the headline in the Indianapolis Star was Voting Fiasco, a Big What-If.   The popular media in Indiana, as they did throughout the country, did their best to try to predict a universal meltdown.  And certainly there was a lot at risk with the mandated deadlines of 2004 and 2006, new statewide voter files being used many times for the first time throughout the country and the machines being used for the first time.  There was certainly a lot at risk and a lot of fodder to scare the voter but it did not happen.  Were there errors on election day?  Absolutely.  Were there any more errors on election day than there ever have been in the history of this country?  Absolutely not.  </P> <P>In Indiana on Election Day, the errors we saw were related mostly to poll worker training or human error utilizing voting systems; the widespread glitches that were predicted simply did not happen.  In Indiana, we have used some form of electronic voting equipment since 1986.  I have personally done several recounts before becoming secretary of state and as secretary of state on these machines.  I have seen absolutely no evidence that machines where intentionally manipulated---simply manipulated to skew the results of an election.  </P> <P>In Indiana, at least until national media count surfaced, there was no lock of voter confidence in utilizing this equipment.  We were used to it and the poll workers were used to it.  And as Gracia explained earlier, over time, the workforce of poll workers will become used to this new voting equipment all over the country. And time is what is needed, so we can continue to seed, root, and grow the tremendous change that has occurred over the last two, three, four years, more change than we seen since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the biggest piece is civil rights legislation since that time as well.  It would be detrimental and irresponsible to make further changes in the [indiscernible] structure until you let these human poll workers, election administrators and human voters get used to what we just did to them.  </P> <P>We also have to remember that as the EAC promulgates more voluntary voter system guidelines and as we make this push for more technology in our process, push a concept I truly believe in, we have got to stop being afraid of technology and using it in our electoral process just as we use it in almost every other part of our lives; quite simply, vote how we live in the 21st century.  But if we do not slow this train down a little bit,  first of all, we are going to be building systems that humans who only do this twice a year at a precinct or polling place can operate, and perhaps even no amount of training will get them there.  </P> <P>And we are building voting systems now - I alluded to it in the last Standards Board Meeting that probably could be used on the space shuttle.  And if they are not being used on the space shuttle, let s try to keep it simple.  Every time we do a voting system guideline or voluntary or not, we are sending the industry these vendors out to go do more research and development that they do not get paid for; it costs them money. Then they have to bring the results to that research and development to market, and by the time they sell them we are changing it again.  So we are also putting at risk the entire industry, and the government is going a need the vending industry to put on an election.  I do not think the government---I do not know if anyone here---maybe they are---promoting the idea that government get into the business of making our voting machines.  </P> <P>In Indiana we just saw how VTI, a voting system company, a very small one, only operating at three states and only four countries in Indiana s 92 counties, just went out to business, and we have a primary election in May.  And we are doing our work around and we will have an election in May.  But it is my warning sign that the industry is delicate and fragile.  Hacking was not commonplace at polling place in Indiana at all for the 2006 elections, and the pre-election reports of hacking in the voting system simply did not translate into the real polling place environment, especially when you have two or more parties watching over each other to make sure that the processes are upheld.  </P> <P>But poll worker training is worth a significant amount of investment in time.  And I would submit to this audience that they consider ways to focus on the people and the processes, and maybe there are some of these scientists in the room, or maybe they need to be in the room.  But logistics managers, supply chain kind of management that you see in companies all over the world employ maybe can be used with Indiana s 30,000 poll workers and 5500 precincts.  It is logistics in a lot of ways that can help move the voter, move the ballot, get an accurate count.  </P> <P>We have got to---and I will conclude, so I can offer our final colleague here some time speak and then take your questions.  But we have to remember that these voting machines are not the election.  They are a tool, and, again, a simple tool that should be used by people trained well to put on our elections to keep this society free.  It is the people that make this election, the workers and the voters that determine the success of the election and that determined the success in 2006, and not any machine.  So I thank you for your time and look forward to your questions in an academic and healthy and really practical debate as well.  Thank you.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  Okay.  Thanks to Norman and Tom and John and Tim and Matt and Molly, so much to thank them for all the hard work in putting this together.  I do appreciate it.  I m pleased to be up here with this esteemed panel.  There is only one thing I m going to disagree with John about, which is my last name is Hasen.  I will be, though, somewhat of a dissenting voice here on the question of whether or not the election system is broken.</P> <P>And I thought it would be useful to start and ask how would we evaluate election administration in the 2006 election.  What is the standard by which we judge it?  And it seems to me that there are at least three standards that we might use.  We might use a meltdown standard; we might ask did the system lead to the kind of chaos that we saw in 2000?  A public confidence standard: What do voters think of the election process; and election administration competence standard, which we might think of as potential meltdown.  So these are all different ways that we might evaluate whether or not the 2006 elections were a success or a failure.  </P> <P>On the meltdown standard, clearly the election in 2006 was a success.  We did not see the question of the balance of the Senate or the House go into overtime.  Now, the chances of a meltdown having national implications are quite small because it would require either the presidency to be at issue or control of the House or the Senate.  The chances of that happening are very small.  We came very close and we are lucky that the election administration in Virginia and Montana was beyond what we might call the margin of litigation.   If the election rose or fell on the outcome of the Florida 13th congressional district, we still would not know who would control that House because we still have a dispute.  </P> <P>So the meltdown standard is---maybe that is what the media is most interested in but in terms of the chances of a meltdown in any particular election, they are pretty small.  And if that is our standard of success, then it is a pretty low standard and we are going to meet it most times.  Preparing for 2000 is like for preparing for a Category-V hurricane.  You need to do it because of the catastrophe but it is not so it happens all that often.  So that is the meltdown standard.  </P> <P>What about public opinion?  When I was here - I do not remember if it was last year or the year before - I put up these slides.  These are from NES data that show the difference in Republican and Democratic voter views and confidence in the election process.  And what it shows is that in 1996 - we were lucky this question was asked before 2000 - Democrats and Republicans had pretty much similar views about confidence that the election process was fair.  But by 2004, only 2.9 percent of Republican respondents thought the presidential election was run in a very unfair way compared to 21.5 percent of Democrats.  And what seemed to be from this pattern was that losers had less confidence than winners because we saw these figures reversed in the Washington gubernatorial contest where after a court battle and recounts, Democrats were much more confident in the process than Republicans.  </P> <P>Now, what do we know about 2006?  The most troubling survey that I have seen - and I think I have not had a chance to canvas everything yet - was an October 2006 by Pew, which asked the question Are you confident your vote will be accurately counted?   Seventy nine percent of Republicans were very confident compared to 45 percent of Democrats.  And if you look at the gap by race, 63 percent of whites compared to 30 percent of blacks were very confident; 29 percent of blacks compared to 8 percent of whites were not at all confident.  And this other chart from PEW, the percentage of black s confidence in accurate vote counting.  </P> <P>So in 2004, there were 15 percent of African-Americans who said they were either not too confident or not at all confident---15 percent.  That number has now doubled to 30 percent from 2004-2006.  So if we are using public confidence, there is a lot to be worried about.  Now, we need to see---my prediction would be that Democrats are going to be happier with election administration.  Now that they see the results of the 2006 election, the Republicans are going to be less happy.  But I have not seen any post-election surveys yet asking that question; we will have to see what happens in 2008.  </P> <P>The third way and, I think, one of the ways we definitely want to evaluate the question of whether or not the 2006 election was a success or a failure - is by using the election administration competence standard:  Were the elections administered not with perfection but in a competent way?  And what we saw were serious isolated problems, and the two largest problems were the problems in Denver with the electronic poll books and then further problems with county absentee ballots.  I think by any measure that election was run in a not-competent way.  Plus, we have the Florida 13 race with the unexplained number of under-votes using electronic voting machines and the controversy over that.  </P> <P>I think that election alone raises serious questions about how we are going to conduct recounts with electronic voting machines.  We also saw less serious widespread problems all throughout the country - poll worker problems, machine malfunction, et cetera.  Those, I agree, are to be expected, and so long as we have rules in place and we do not see systematic errors, I agree that if we could get to that standard, we would be in pretty good shape.  </P> <P>The other thing that I track as a law professor is the amount of litigation.  What we saw---and this is a chart I also put up the last time I was here comparing election litigation before and after 2000 in the Bush versus Gore case that went to the Supreme Court.  And so what this chart showed was that, on the average, in the period before Bush versus Gore there were about 96 election challenge cases a year. And that number shot up to 254 cases on average in the post-Bush versus Gore period.  I have just started my preliminary look at the numbers and there are at least 240 cases in the calendar year 2006.  So, that says that we are consistent with the higher trend that we have seen since the post-2000 period.  </P> <P>I want to address, finally, two of the main issues I see lurking out there from the 2006 election.  The first is the extent to which litigation over election administration issues is taking place in the absence of good empirical evidence.  And I think the voter identification litigation, which we saw come to the fore in 2005 and 2006 in a number of states shows that courts are making decisions about voter ID in the absence of good empirical evidence either on the extent to which there is impersonation fraud, that is, people who are going to the polls and voting as someone else, and the extent to which there is deterrence of eligible voters caused by this voter ID loss.</P> <P>There is a lot of talk about voter access versus voter integrity but very little empirical evidence on either of these two points.  So, how have courts dealt with that and what evidence is out there?  So first, there was a preliminary report that was submitted to the EAC saying that on the question of voter impersonation fraud, there really is very little evidence of voter impersonation fraud.  I think that the EAC s handling of that report and it s otherwise handling of the question of what had caused election crimes is troubling, and we can talk about that more in the questions and comments.  </P> <P>There was also, on the other empirical question, the question of how much deterrence is there?  How many people are not showing up at the polls?  There is a preliminary study by the Eagleton Institute on deterrence of eligible voters showing that there is a decline in voting in states using voter identification loss especially among racial minorities.  That is a preliminary study but we need more work to see if that conclusion bears out or not, but it does raise a flag.  </P> <P>Now, how have courts dealt with this?  The Supreme Court, I think, very troubling opinion in Purcell versus Gonzalez; not troubling necessarily for what the Court did, which was to allow Arizona's voter ID law to remain in place for the impending election.  But the Court suggested that in deciding whether or not a voter identification law is constitutional, the Court should balance the feeling that some voters might have that they are disenfranchised because of impersonation fraud, and the suggestion just came out of nowhere and there is really no evidence whatsoever out there about this feeling of disenfranchisement.  </P> <P>I would also point to Judge Posner's very troubling opinion in the Seventh Circuit case involving the Indiana voter identification law.  Again, I am not saying that the result was wrong; the Court could have simply said, We do not have a lot of evidence of impersonation fraud.  We do not have a lot of evidence of depressed turnout.  Therefore, we will let the state do what it wants to do.   But Judge Posner put in a lot of dicta [sounds like] about the value of voting and about the voting crimes as the equivalent of littering that I just think really demeaned the value of the voter.  Also, it just was very troubling in terms of its [indiscernible] and how courts are going to address these issues in the future.  </P> <P>So, courts, while they are not necessarily reaching the wrong results, are sending some troubling signals about how courts are supposed to  evaluate these kinds of claims.  The courts seem to be going by the seat of their pants rather than looking at any kind of empirical evidence.  </P> <P>And, finally, the other big issue besides voter ID that came out of the 2006 elections are electronic voting issues.  We saw the Sarasota, the Florida 13 problems, and I have read the---anyone interested in this, I would advise you to read the Mebane and Dill paper as well as the Heron Paper.  Those are the two papers out there that present different views as to whether this might be caused by some kind of problem with the ballot design, how things were laid out, or some kind of problem with the machines; I think we still do not know.  We then saw Florida Governor's decision---Florida was the first one to outlaw punch cards.  After a tremendous investment it is now getting rid of all of its electronic voting machines.  We also saw a controversy at the EAC over the contract with the cyber-company that was supposed to verify these machines, and I think that was handled very poorly.  There is a lot of talk of possible congressional legislation involving voter paper trails that we need to keep our eye on. </P> <P>And the final point, which, I think, sometimes gets lost in the discussion of whether we need a paper trail or not is the question of voter confidence.  It might be that these machines, in fact, are not hackable and that they are more accurate.  It could be that they are more accurate than other voting machines, but if the public has lost confidence in those machines we need to address the question of whether lack of public confidence alone should be a reason to not continue---have election administration continue to purchase those machines.  I am not saying that the alternative is an education campaign about how great and accurate these machines are.  But it is something we need to address.  If these machines are causing a decline in voter confidence, what should we do about that?</P> <P>John Fortier:  Next, we will turn to some questions from out there but I think Rick has stirred it up enough that we might want some response here.  I guess, both on the issue of voter ID and paper trails.  Maybe we could get Todd and Gracia to say something to Rick's presentation, but also just generally about the issue.  These are issues that have---since the Help America Vote Act has been passed and been addressed significantly in state legislatures and we have new developments on the ground.  So, you can pick your poise and start, each of you on either issue.  But I would like to hear from both.</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  Drink from the well or drink from the Cool Aid, as it is, huh?  I think I will focus on the issue of public confidence in the voting systems.  When I woke up this morning, I really thought I was still dreaming or in some kind of a nightmare.  I wake up to the radio alarm and the first thing I heard was an NPR report or some report on public radio about Diebold and I thought, My God, can I never get away from this?   I need to program my radio to a music station so that when I wake up---but apparently Diebold is doing some public relations initiatives and admitted that when it got into the industry of voting systems in the United States, a lot of the systems used after 2000 had not been widely tested.  </P> <P>So, what we are going through is a process and it is not just Diebold; going through a process where the systems used have to be used while they are being tested.  And the equation of the manufacturers being able to make adjustments along the way gets complex because of standards, processes that are in place.  Before the Election Assistance Commission, voting system standards were adopted by the Federal Election Commission and the testing and certification of voting systems was done by a non-governmental organization on a voluntary basis that did not receive any funding from anywhere to do it, and that was the National Association of State Election Directors.  </P> <P>The Help America Vote Act mandated that the EAC implement, adopt what used to be called standards, now guidelines; adopt guidelines and set up a system for the accreditation of laboratories and the testing and certification of systems.  We did not pick up---and I do not think any federal agency would assume responsibility for any kind of testing or certification or accreditation done by a non-governmental organization or a non-federal agency.  </P> <P>So our program started new.  It is a very complex set of guidelines.  Yet, and still, when we put out our first set of guidelines in 2005 we received over 6,000 comments from across the country from many different sectors.  So there is a process in place with a lot of transparency and a lot of public import with respect to what is it that the standards, the voting system standards, should provide for to ensure the integrity of that process.  </P> <P>And then what is the process with respect to accreditation of laboratories?  We are working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  What a lot of people may not realize is that in our 2005 standards we did put in provisions that if a DRE has a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, there is a standard for the mechanism that produces that paper trail; that is already there.  The EAC did not take a position as to whether the state should or should not because the states made it very clear that that was going to be a decision that they would make and that is what the Help America Vote Act provides for.  </P> <P>So in this complex quilt with conflicting interests, competing demands, it takes a while for things to kind of weave and come together, and we will be there; we will make sense out of this.  We just cannot do it with $14 million a year and in a two year period of time.  It takes a lot more than that.  Now the states, yes; the states have a lot more money to work with.  But with respect to the Election Assistance Commission we have had a budget that has averaged at about $12 million a year over the past two years, a little higher now.  So, we are going to get there but---yes, yes.  And I do not believe---well, let me say it differently.  </P> <P>I believe setting a goal of perfection is a sure enough way to fail; rather, to strive for excellence.  Even competence might be a little low, but to strive for excellence is a good place to go, and every once in a while it is wonderful to be able to say, Boy, that was perfect.  That was sweet.  That was perfect.   But for the most part, excellence is an achievable standard that produces the kind of results that provide good customer service to voters.  </P> <P>And my last point is we have blurred the lines between partisan political shenanigans - Who is stealing an election?  - and the competence or excellence of election administration; and those two things get blurred.  If a voting system is supposed to prevent the stealing of an election then the conversation needs to be held in a way---what does the voter think?  It means when says that the elections can be stolen.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Todd, maybe, I guess, you can start with the voter ID law.  You have an Indiana new voter ID law which was upheld by the court, as Rick mentioned.  Rick had some points on voter ID laws in general.  From your perspective, the reasons behind it, how it worked on the ground.  And if you can say something broader about some of the other states as well, that would be helpful.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Okay, thank you.  I was at the Seventh Circuit oral argument and when that three-panel court decided in favor of Indiana s---or at least when they took argument on Indiana s voter ID law then, subsequently, undecided in favor of it.  And all three of them, including and especially Judge Posner---I felt I was in front of some of the most intelligent human beings I have ever experienced and how lucky we were as Americans and the Seventh Circuit to have them.  And that was before the decision, not knowing which way it was going to go, and I want that on the record.  Because however you feel about the decision, it was not a decision that was made lightly and there are a lot of probing questions asked by all three of those panelists that focused on both sides of the issue, and it was well-vetted.  </P> <P>I also want to propose, again, a different standard than the three outlined by the law professor; and, again, fair, accurate and accessible ought to be the standard that we are on.  What I heard in Rick s discussion points to, I think, the major flaw in this argument.  He started out talking about a photo ID and was there really a need and the complete lack supposedly of evidence that would justify the need for the photo ID.  At least we need to talk about that, he said.  And that is what we should be focusing on next, getting that data.  But, then, when we talked about the machines, he indicates---I do not mean to pin this all on him -- I am hearing this same discussion all over the country from academics and the media.  When we get to the machine portion of the discussion it is, Well, even if the electronic machines are more accurate and even if they do a better job, should we not go back to paper just simply for voter confidence?   Well, you cannot have it both ways, and that is exactly what we just heard separated by about 15 to 20 breaths.</P> <P>So if we are going to be academically true to both these arguments, maybe we should look at them both in terms of either strict empirical data, or voter confidence, or a blend of each but treat them both that way.  With regard to photo ID, the fact that matter is it improves voter confidence.  There is voter fraud; it does happen at the polls; it just does not happen in Indiana.  But whether it happens one time out of ten, two times out of ten, twelve times out of ten, or not; if the voter feels that something is wrong, like some voters feel that something is wrong with an electronic machine, and the result of that is they do not come and participate because they say, Why invest my time - I am a busy person in a process that does not reflect my intentions, then that perception is reality.  And regardless of empirical data or not you need to account for that, and by removing that suspicion off the table, by requiring everyone in a uniform equal fashion to provide an easily accessible photo ID that they know they have to produce ahead of time, you do remove that argument from the table.  </P> <P>You do improve voter confidence and you see voter turn-out actually go up in Indiana two points in 2006.  Now, was that because a photo ID was not driven by the fact that we have three hotly contested congressional races in Indiana?  Probably more the latter.  But my point is we are never going to know, and you are never going to know about prosecutions in Indiana or anywhere else for a number of reasons.  First of all, we cannot get good data down to that county level.  Even if prosecutors file charges, most of them settle.  There is no website you go to to get that information, unless you manually flip through all the paper records at every county court house in this nation and find a settlement document.  </P> <P>Then there is the issue, like in many states like Indiana, where the prosecutors have complete discretion on what charges to file at any given criminal action.  And many of them simply just do not file charges, even though they reported to them because their dockets are full with people who have violently hurt each other or domestic issues or whatever else.  And it is just does not, for whatever reason, rise to the top; for some, it does.  And I applaud those that do take it seriously because it is out there.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I just want to respond briefly on the voter ID point.  First, there is a major difference between the public confidence question on paper trails, and I have not taken a position on whether we need them or not but just flagging the issue.  Paper trails on the one hand and voter ID on the other---there is no constitutional right to cast a vote on an electronic voting machine and there are not interests on both sides.  It is a question of what is the best means of administering an election to count votes in a fair and accurate way; whereas on the voter ID question, there are constitutional issues on both sides.  There is the constitutional right to cast a vote in an election that is run free of fraud or as free of fraud as we can get it; and there is the constitutional right not to have unreasonable barriers put in front of the right to vote.  </P> <P>And so public confidence alone should not be able to trump in that secondary where maybe as a policy matter it might trump in the first area.  And I should say that back in 2004 I actually came out and said that there is such a divide between Democrats, Republicans on the voter ID laws.  And, in fact, with the exception of Arizona where it was passed through an initiative, every state that has passed a voter ID law has done so with Republicans supporting it and Democrats have almost uniformly opposed it.  </P> <P>There is such a divide that what we really need to do is come up with a compromise that deals with both access and integrity, and the compromise would be this: Mandatory voter ID coupled with universal voter registration conducted and paid for by the government, where the government pays for every piece of paper you need.  If it is a birth certificate, if it is transportation to get to the DMP, the governments takes care of getting you the ID and maintaining the voter rolls.  We get rid of the bounty hunters.  We have accurate voter rolls.  We do not worry about when people move.  It would be a way of dealing with both concerns about access and integrity, but as [indiscernible] the last time, I remember, I think, as Tom called it, a complete non-starter, so it may not be politically realistic but it is the only way to bridge, I think, this divide between Democrats and Republicans over the extent of fraud and the need to have a voter ID law.</P> <P>John Fortier: Does anybody want to take on paper trails before we go to the audience here?  Just in terms of sort of what happened in 2006.  Many of the states that originally had introduced electronic voting systems retrofitted their systems.  A number of states had some problems with their paper trails but it seems that in many ways we are moving in that direction.  What do we take from 2006 in terms of paper trails?</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I ll just say one thing, which is that as Commissioner Hillman said, we are asking election administrators to do the impossible, which is to roll out these systems.  We have elections so frequently in this country that there is really not a lot of time to test-drive things.  And so when you start retrofitting and changing, it is inevitable; whether you talking about paper trails or anything else there are going to be problems.  And I think that with the paper trails it is the same issue.  Denver was an example not of the paper trail issue but where, if you roll out a new system during a midterm election, that is the problem.  You need to be starting on the local level---small elections.  Whatever you are going to change, you need to try it then. </P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  EAC has a very high level, maybe, of what you call the 30-thousand-mile perspective on paper trail but it really comes down to the states and local jurisdictions who have to design the ballots, make sure that the systems are programmed and actually implement the system; train their staff and co-workers how to operate the system.  Who can give the best feedback as to what is needed to produce a VVPAT that will contribute to voter confidence, since I think that is what it all boils down to, as well as address concerns about how would a recount be conducted if the voter has not been able to verify his or her vote.  The electronic machines can produce paper record of every single transaction that has happened on that machine.  The difference is that the voter will not have seen that at the time that he or she votes.  </P> <P>So, that is what voter-verifiable is about.  So there were two different discussions, and if voter verifiable increases voter confidence, so be it.  But does it increase voter confidence as people are going through which printer or which mechanism works or how long is it going to take to get to the technology that is going to be as error-free as one would need in an election.</P> <P>John Fortier: Okay, we are going to turn to the audience.  We have Matt Weil here with the mic and so when you raise your hand I will recognize you and then identify yourself before asking a question. I guess I will identify Roy Saltman here, but wait for the mic.</P> <P>Roy Saltman:  Hi, I am Roy Saltman, author of the History and Politics of Voting Technology, published in 2006.  Ms. Hillman, thank you very much for your very worthy service to the government and the people in the Election Assistance Commission for the past several years.  You mentioned the need for paper trails to improve public confidence.  Does this mean that you insist in paper technology to guarantee the correctness of results, or would you be willing to accept guaranteed independent verification of results, regardless of whether the method involved paper or no paper?</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  Thank you for the question because it gives me an opportunity to correct.  I am not insisting or advocating one way or the other about a voter-verifiable paper audit trail.  What I am saying is if states believe having a VVPAT will increase voter confidence, that is certainly an option available to them because it is the voter-verifiable piece of this that is the crux of the public debate right now.  I am a big fan of technology and I can see both perspectives, the need to fix it and get it right right now, not 10 years from now.  And sometimes it takes two decades to go through a transformation process versus the need to be able to have adequate time, adequate research and development, adequate testing to allow technology to provide the many ways that voting systems can support elections, including different means of independent verification.  </P> <P>And so I am all for the research and testing.  I do not have a clue who else is here.  I know two people are here from Congress representing committee on the Hill, but I really do believe that up to $30 million that is in the Help America Vote Act, authorized, not appropriated, for research and development and testing and study needs to be seriously considered so that we can do some of this and not just leave it to an election date to be when the machines are tested. </P> <P>And I just want to take a quick moment to introduce the two new members of the Election Assistance Commission.  Seated over here in the front row are Commissioners Hunter and Rodriquez.  This is their first week on the job and I want to say that I am trying to find out---and if anybody here has information, I want to know if there is any other federal commission with full-time commissioners, or any federal commission, even part-time, that has all women on the commission.  We are so pleased that the Election Assistance Commission, all four commissioners are women. Thank you.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Okay, we have a question right here.  Wait is the mic.</P> <P>Vladimir Caramorso [phonetic]]:  Thank you.  I am Vladimir Caramorso with RTVI Television.  I have a question for anybody on the panel.  Is there an international aspect to US election reform?  What I mean is are there other attempts to learn, for instance, from the experiences and practices of Western European democracies, attempts to import some practices from Western Europe?  And, also, do you think there should be such attempts and such interaction?   Thank you. </P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Thank you for the question.  As a Secretary of the State I am very interested in what is happening in other countries.  A couple of quick examples come to mind.  First of all, I understand that Estonia and the United Kingdom, perhaps some other countries that I do not know about, are not just experimenting but piloting, if not more, a process to vote through the Internet.  </P> <P>These are countries that are not afraid to technology, and to my point and my remarks, they are harnessing technology to use it for the voting process, much like they do to the rest of---other parts of their lives.  And a schizophrenia that still exists in this country when we want to be tied to a piece of paper; and maybe we do, and maybe these pilots in the other countries will end up failing.  But I find that very interesting as a secretary of state because I think as long as we are going to be tied in to a piece of paper and voting the same way, in effect, that we have ever since we stopped using voice votes to conduct our elections, will we ever be able to harness technology like the Internet or whatever is next or after the Internet or however the Internet evolves?  Secondly, it seems like every other country in the world---I cannot say every, but most other democracies or republics use a photo ID.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I think there is also another set of lessons we can learn.  Back in 2004, I went to Australia and looked at their election system.  I interviewed Jean-Pierre Kingsley who until last month was the chief elections officer of Canada.  I think almost every advanced democracy besides United States uses non-partisan election officials to run their elections.  Again, I think Tom called this a non-starter when I mentioned it last time, which was National Non-Partisan Election Administration in this country.  </P> <P>I do not think that is happening, but on the state level it can happen.  And I think the way it could happen is this:  The state should pass laws, and, maybe, in initiative states voters should pass voter initiatives that would establish the chief elections officer as an appointed position for a long term; appointed by the governor and confirmed by a 75%-vote of state legislature, which would require broad consensus among the major parties in virtually every state; to move towards a system where the allegiance of the person running the election is ultimately to the integrity of the election process, rather than to any particular party.  At the very least, a lesson we should learn and it is amazing to me that we have not.  </P> <P>Chief elections officers of states should not be honorary, or otherwise, chairs of presidential campaign committees in their states.  It is the conflict of interest --- forget the appearance of impropriety; the conflict of interest is palpable and it should stop.  And there have been some bills proposed to do this.  In California it was done voluntarily by the secretary of state, and I would love to see the National Association of Secretaries of State get behind something like that.</P> <P>John Fortier:  I am not going to ask Todd to respond to that, but we can--- I also meant to thank you for your question, Vladimir.  Vladimir is too modest; in addition to being a correspondent for [indiscernible] Television, he is probably the only person in the room who has run in an election, not as the state s favorite candidate in Russia.  Anybody else want to raise their hand?  We will go to Curtis in the back there.</P> <P>Curtis:  I want to support both of the things that Rick Hasen suggested.  I did a paper for the Carter-Baker Commission on Voter ID.  And the way you eliminate the barrier called registration and you eliminate the fear of fraud is a mandatory ID that cannot be forge, which I think is also [indiscernible].  The problem with all of that is the cost; the upfront cost to that is $14 billion, which essentially means we probably are not going to get it on the sole justification of the voting process. We will probably have to get it through national defense, but I think there will be cost savings and integrity savings that will be well worth the price within the voting system.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Okay, I will go to another question.  Why don't we go right here?  The mic is just behind you.</P> <P>Female:  I am with an election reform group in Virginia.  My question is for Mr. Rokita.  You said in your talk that public confidence in the election machines was high until the media started running reports.  I'm kind reminded of the way airline travelers felt about security until 9/11.  Is it not the job of the media to point out when something is wrong and there are vulnerabilities in the system?  And are we not best served by knowing those and would not public confidence be higher if we felt that our election officials were taking them seriously?</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Thank you for the question.  I completely agree with the media being involved as a way to maintain and foster a free society, and transparency is critical, especially in our electoral process.  But, the process is not being reported accurately and it is not a simple process.  And so you see in the popular media a lot of half-stories.  The reporters are on different beats all the time; they are not expected to be doing this job everyday.  And my point was as a result---and by the way, they have to sell newspapers and they have to compete [indiscernible] weeks.  And I deal with that as an elected official and chief election officer everyday.  I feel I know the business of the media, and they have advertisers that they have to attract.  And that is how you get headlines that are completely irresponsible, like Voting Fiasco: A Big What-If. I could go through a hundred headlines and news stories that do the very the same thing.  </P> <P>Really, I believe, that the predominant purpose of attracting advertisers and viewers and readers---and that is what is wrong about this.  And that is when I say voter confidence is going down unnecessarily because the stories are driven by that, and not with a desire to explain the entire situation for the voter.  If the voter knew all the processes and back-ups that were in place that makes whether or not a voting machine works completely irrelevant to whether or not their votes were counted, voter confidence would not be affected as I believe it has been.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I remember there was a USA Today headline about a week before the election that said Vote May Not Be a Fiasco, and that was news, which I felt was kind of---</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Very much appreciate it, then.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I had an op-ed in the New York Times right after the election.  I said the problem with the news media is that they pay attention only in the period right before the election and it actually takes public pressure and public interest all the time, so that what happens is four years go by, or two years now with the mid-terms, and all of a sudden about the month and a half before the election my phone is ringing off the hook with people who want to know why has not anything been done?  And then a week after the election, assuming that there is nothing at overtime, the phone calls stopped.  And then they started again right before the next election, and it become cyclical.  </P> <P>Public interest and presence is cyclical and the time to act is now, and maybe now is even too late.  But in between elections is when you need to fix things, not three weeks before the elections.  We do not have our good rules in place for a particular problem and it is a problem with not enough media attention or media attention concentrated in too short a period of time.</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  Let me just quickly add the repetition of erroneous information, that is, a lot of times the media use another news report as their source document and do not verify back.  And so if there was an error in the original article it gets repeated, repeated, repeated, and there is no time to catch it for correction.</P> <P>Rick Sincere [phonetic]:  My name is Rick Sincere. I am a member of Electoral Board in the City of Charlottesville.  We have been using electronic voting machines since May 2002, and out of 2000 voters in our city we have only had three or four complaints about the machines from some activists.  And I would like to mention an anecdote; we had the annual meeting of the Virginia Electoral Board Association this past weekend.  The Speaker from Colorado was there, Scott Doyle of Larimore County.  He was talking about election centers and he off-handedly remark that voters in his county offered a choice between paper and electronic voting machines.  Someone asked him what the level of preference was, and he said people decided 4 to 1 to use the electronic machines; they were lined up to use those and did not want to use paper.  I just wanted to get a comment on that.</P> <P>Rick Hasen: That is a big contrast with what happened on Sarasota County where in the same election that they had these problems they voted to get rid of their electronic voting machines. I think it depends very much on the local experience.  So in Los Angeles County we happened to have a terrific registrar of voters, Connie McCormack [phonetic] and she has been using electronic voting machines at early voting centers and it is very popular; people who have a lot of confidence.  I think so much is locally driven on this question.</P> <P>Chris Charlotte:  Hi, Chris Charlotte with the Committee of Seventy from Philadelphia.  When we were talking about structural reform, to me one of the greatest weaknesses is the fact that we have---I believe in local administration but having local funding.  Over time we are going to end up seeing disparities in the quality of equipment and training.  Again, I mean the government bought everybody new equipment but I think there is going to be disparities in election opportunity between wealthy and poor counties.  What are your thoughts on that?  Do we ever see any possibility of per capita funding for voting by the federal government?</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  I think you are right about the levels of funding.  The country has gone -- the United States has gone through that over the years where, on the main, elections are not adequately funded.  And I do worry as to whether state legislators, governors and county officials are paying attention to the implications of fair, accurate and assessable---and the dollars that are required to ensure that, because there will be the cost.  I cannot speak to whether Congress will continue to fund on any kind of a regular basis or not; if you would look at it at right now, one would think not.  And so, the states really are going to have to figure out how to pick up that responsibility, and soon.  I mean, if we are already in the fiscal year 2008-2009 cycle, 2010 is not far away, and I think a lot of the Help America Vote Act dollars will have been spent by states by 2010.</P> <P>John Fortier:  I will go to this side of the room, here in the front.  Sort of in front.</P> <P>Nathan Cimenska [phonetic]:  My name is Nathan Cimenska from [indiscernible].  I do not know whether the federal government provides any money for poll worker training and the payment for the actual service on election date, but is there any thought of maybe asking for something like that?  Because it seems like the money is creating a lot of problems and I think it may also be creating a push towards all-vote-by-mail [sounds like] elections and I would like also to hear whether you guys think the all-vote-by mail is a good idea.  Thanks.</P> <P>John C. Fortier:  As a moderator I will take a little privilege.  I do not think all-vote-by-mail is a good idea.  I have a book on absentee and early voting out recently and I am skeptical of it.  But now turning back to my role as moderator, would anybody else like to chime in?</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  John, I agree with you completely.</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  On the issue of federal dollars to support poll worker training, the only piece of that that has been covered is recruitment and training of college poll workers to try to really engage campuses across the country to prepare the next generation of poll workers.  But right now there are no plans for the federal government to do that, although it is my understanding that is being discussed in some circles in Congress.  I just have not seen it yet in legislation.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Let me just add, as a chief election official that trains trainers, my office uses Help America Vote funds to train our county clerks and their staff so they can train those 30,000 poll workers that I have talked about.  And it was not until recently I realized that where we could really use some help, funding and some academic research around is in how to teach.  I have learned recently that there are different ways that we learn; some of us learn better by reading; some of us learn better by writing something down; some of us actually learn by being able to, as we are being lectured to, fiddle with things in our hand and create little models.  </P> <P>We actually used all three of those concepts when we taught our local election officials to use our new statewide voter file that have a funding paid for.  It is a brand new system in the entire state and everyone was nervous and scared about it.  And by utilizing the best method to reach someone, we were able to make the system work right out of the box.  If we again applied some of that thinking around how we are teaching our poll workers, I think we get better results and I would love to see some funding and some research around that because we are not teachers, and we are put in a position of having to teach.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Okay, I will take two more questions here.  I will take this one and then I will come back.</P> <P>Sally Cooper:  Sally Cooper with the Volunteer Election Reforms Task Force.  My question, I think, is for Rick Hasen--- but anyone.  And that is when something seems totally out-of-whack in an election, such as Florida, and there is a need to really go in and check the machinery, one assumes in this case not fraud, we will say, but something wrong with the machinery. And you have on the company side the need for proprietary elements and maybe there is something wrong with the source code; you are not sure what you need to dig.  So, because this is so essential, the election process for the health of our country, you need to dig, you need transparency.  So how do you balance best needing to dig on one side, proprietary on the other?</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  Yes, I do not think that that is an insurmountable problem because courts deal with trade secrets all the time and they allow for limited inspections of things, confidentiality agreements.  And so one of the things that the plaintiff s lawyers were trying to do in Florida was to have the court allow for this kind of inspection with an agreement not to disclose any of the trade secrets.  And as I understand it, the trial court rejected that and that is now up on appeal as to whether not that is going to be made.  </P> <P>But I think courts should be very willing to allow for that kind of inspection.  If we are going to have a private system, you are right that the incentives are there that we need to keep things---keep the profit motive for these companies to stay in business, but we also need to ensure the integrity of our elections.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Okay, we are going to take one more question.  Congressman Ehlers will be joining us shortly.  I do not think we are going to break, but let me see how that goes.  But let me take one question more here in the front.</P> <P>Female Voice:  Thank you.  I am from Massachusetts as the select-woman member for Amherst.  I would like to ask the question I understand you are trying to address the issue as fairness and a fraud-free election.  But I am much more interested in offering accessibility to voters, and I understand that because of the budget constraint we can only open our polls from 7 am to 8 pm, which we have tried hard to extend from the original 7 am to noon.  So it is a big progress, but in my mind I feel that accessibility is just as important as the fairness issue in order to encourage voters to come out and vote to express their sentiment of elective officials.  </P> <P>So, I wonder what you think in terms of following the Internet that we purchase online, and that really increase the consumer purchasing desire.  So, for example, you go online to book a flight so Southwest has great business this way.  In order to encourage voters to vote and give their two cents, I would like to see---follow the business model, make it convenient 24/7, anytime, vote it and express your sentiment.</P> <P>John Fortier:  You have mentioned Internet voting. I will chime in one more time here.  My concerns with all-mail voting, which I mentioned before, are that we separate the voter from many of the protections of the polling place, whether it is protections that a voter has to cast a secret ballot so that their vote is not coerced or other protections in terms of the security of the ballot, which are better held at a polling place than if the ballot disappears out into your kitchen table or on the Internet.  And so I do -- even if we work out many security problems with the transmission of the vote, I think there still is that question of are you going to be pressured by someone else out there casting an Internet ballot.  That is not to say that there are not many convenience issues that we might address in other ways.  </P> <P>There are all sorts of interesting experiments, as Scott Doyle mentioned about vote centers, which, of course, did have some problems in Denver but that was---but [indiscernible] successful in other parts.  Early voting also is something that, at least, in a limited way, I would be supportive of for a period of time where you can vote.  People like it, I think, as well as they do all-mail voting but my concern is that we not move too far away from our traditional protections at the polling place.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  John, thank you for that.  I completely agree with you for the same reasons.  I am not saying we need to go out and Internet-vote tomorrow.  My point was if we were always going to be tied to a piece of paper, is that hindering us from eventually getting to what I think is a wonderful goal to use the technology the way we live?  There are ways we can use Internet technology now, like in electronic poll books that might be used in a vote center.  Indiana is piloting in two of its counties the concept of vote centers.  This election cycle we are going to get empirical data and see if it works in Indiana or does not.  And so far all the signs are good.  </P> <P>But if you take the concept of vote centers for a second and you harness the technology, use it the way we live, then you can start running poll workers in shifts without wearing them out because you need fewer of them.  In Scott Doyle s county he uses half the poll workers that he did before going to vote centers.  And if you run the poll workers in shifts then you can practically keep the polls open longer, and we have moved one step forward in using technology to vote how we live.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I agree with the concerns that John has raised but I also point out that there are a lot of downsides to what [indiscernible] has called the hyper-federalization of our elections, that we have something like 14,000 different election jurisdictions in this country.  But there is a benefit, too, which is that a small place can decide to try and experiment with Internet voting and we can see how it goes.  And, in fact, if I am remembering correctly, the Arizona Democratic Party ran its presidential primary in 2004 over the Internet.  And so there are issues about the Voting Rights Act.  There are all kinds of questions but at least we can try experimenting and see how thing go.</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  If I can just add that some states do use some forms of Internet voting for our overseas citizens and military because of tight time constraints as to when the ballot can go out and when it comes back.  And the Election Assistance Commission has been tasked by Congress to study that.  So I am sure, we will learn some lessons from that exercise as to the security and how it could be applied to domestic voting.</P> <P>John Fortier:  Tom Mann, one of the co-directors of our project here.  Brookings has a question?</P> <P>Tom Mann:  Thank you John.  This is for Gracia and Todd. Gracia, the EAC early on set up, really, a standard of consensual decision-making in which you all were able to agree on virtually everything that you decided, and it diminished some of the concerns of the possible partisanship and politicization of the process.  Are you encouraged that that will continue?  To Todd, it is really a question about NASS, and Leslie could answer it, as well.  It is clear there are partisan differences among the states in approach to voter ID laws and VVPAT and other issues.  Do those not rise to the level of debate within NASS?  Do you manage to keep either a non-partisan or by-partisan organization operating by avoiding the issues that divide parties, or what?</P> <P>Gracia Hillman:  Tom, the direct answer to your question about the consensus agreements and voting among the Commission is yes.  When it comes down to the straight decision making about what improves and enhances election administration in this country, very seldom from the EAC point of view are partisan concerns a driving force.  And that is were---and you heard me say before that the lines get blurred between partisan concerns about who is rigging or stealing in the election who is winning and losing; and what is necessary to be in place for election administration.  And the election administration piece of it is very seldom driven purely on the basis of partisan concerns.  That is not to say that we are not informed by our prior responsibilities and things that we have done; nor is it to say that we do not recognize constituencies who are depending on each of the commissioners to make certain that certain things are represented.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  And then from the NASS perspective, not unlike what Gracia just said about the EAC, we do not avoid issues; I can vouch for that.  They are discussed, but when NASS acts though a resolution or a statement or anything we do officially, what you can take home at night is that a large majority, if not all the secretaries of state are behind it.  And those issues that we cannot agree on or almost unanimously agree on we leave on the table; we do not necessarily discard and we see how those ideas evolve or not over a course of time to see if we can get to that large majority or near unanimity. Sorry, excuse me, I need another cup of coffee; of course, some water.  And we are very proud of that.  The secretaries of state are statespersons and we try to act that way.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  I just want to ask a follow-up question to the secretary, and this is the same question I asked Deb Markowitz when she was at the last of these events.  I thought that NASS passed a very unfortunate resolution calling for the EAC to be disbanded by Congress by the end of 2006.  And I m wondering if there is any talk of repealing that because I think that although I am one of the people who has been critical of how the EAC has done some things, it is certainly needs to continue and it needs to be strengthened rather than gutted.</P> <P>Todd Rokita:  Yes sir, you are an American and that is your opinion.  No, there has not been any further discussion.</P> <P>John Fortier:  On that note---Congressman Ehlers is just about arriving in two minutes so what we are going to do is we are going to break.  We are going to take a short break.  We have coffee in the back, but do not leave.  Do not go far.  We should start right up shortly.  Thank you to the panel.  I appreciate you all.</P> <P> </P> <P> </P> <P>[Congressman Vernon Ehlers]</P> <P> </P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein: Okay, we are going to get started if you could sit. We are going to continue with our program. As you know, we have a 3-part program today. We have just completed a panel and now we are fortunate to have our keynote speaker for today, who is Congressman Vernon Ehlers, who represents the 3rd district of Michigan.  He is currently a ranking member of the House Administration Committee, a committee with jurisdiction over election reform matters, was Chairman in 109th Congress, and was involved very heavily in the passage of the Help America Vote Act, which also went through that committee.  </P> <P>Congressman Ehlers is also a research physicist. And, if this says anything about the field we are involved in that some of the most involved members of Congress are research physicists, the rest of us--- it s no wonder we don t understand what is going on sometimes.  He also with that interest---has a great interest in technology, in issues related to election reform but also was one of the people behind the legislative system THOMAS, which all of us rely on today.  </P> <P>We always take it for granted but if you talked to a lobbyist in the old days, one of the things that lobbyist could tell their clients and get them to pay lots of money for was, I can get you a copy of the bill.   Well, now we can all get a copy of the bill.  That is almost, in part, thanks to Mr. Ehlers.  And of course, the lobbyists are doing fine also.  Congressman Ehlers is going to address today some of the issues in the 2006 elections and look ahead to some of the issues that will be coming up through his committee coming forward in 110th.  Congressman Ehlers?</P> <P> Congressman Vernon Ehlers: Thank you very much. It s a pleasure to be here. For those of you who read the early program I want to make clear to all of you that I am not Dianne Feinstein, and I took my wig off today just so I could be sure you would know.  It s a pleasure to be here participating in this.  I have been involved in many elections over the years since I started out at the county commission level, and, of course, the county clerk had the responsibility. And so I worked very closely with the county clerk in that.  And when I got into state House and then to state Senate, of course, I maintained that interest in elections.  So this is not a new topic for me.</P> <P>I have also learned over the years that every election has errors; some are fraught with errors.  And when he had the fiasco in Florida few years ago my first reaction is, Well, that s normal. It happens all the time. But the rest of the country apparently was not aware of that and got highly upset about that.  </P> <P>What also amused me is that the attack was immediately against punch card voting. Throughout the entire nation, there was an incredible number of punch card voting machines, ballots, etc. My own hometown used punch cards; absolutely no errors, no problems with the punch cards.  And just because one community in the United States did not take the trouble to clean out their punch card punching machines, the whole nation suddenly thought punch cards are awful and the Democrats were bound and determined to get rid of them with the legislation that was passed, namely, HAVA. I objected to that because I think communities should have the right to choose.  And if they want to use punch cards and they can care for them, make them work right, that s fine.  Anyway, also one other comment about that, because of all the talk about a paper trail - now, I happen to think that we should have redundancy in the voting process.</P> <P>There should be alternative ways of trying to determine the vote, to try to zero in on any errors, machine problems, etc. But a paper trail is not necessarily the answer.  And yet, that is what has caught the popular imagination.  Ohio learned the hard way when they passed a law saying that every voting machine, electronic machine, had to produce some paper tape on the side and that paper tape was, by law, the official record of the election.  So, they had a year with no closed elections but they decided to do a trial on a major race and just see how accurate the paper trail was.  Their best estimate is that there is a 10% error rate on the paper tape that was produced by the machines that they had installed; whereas, the electronic machines had extremely low error rate.  </P> <P>So paper trail is fine as long as you carefully define what you mean by the paper trail.  You just don t hang a printer on the side of the computer.  A paper trail could be a paper ballot which is optically scanned.  And there are a number of other ways to do it.  The important thing is not a paper trail; the important thing is redundancy. And it can be electronic redundancy as well, and in many cases would be far better than the simple printer on the side of the computer.  I would also point out to all those who advocate a paper trail without specifying what type that punch card ballots are paper; rather heavy paper, but they are a paper trail and you know what has happened with those.  </P> <P>Well, let me get into some of the details.  Election reform is a broad and difficult topic to capture in a short time and I would basically start off by discussing a very simple case that is current.  It is symbolic of the challenges that we face today.  Florida s 13th Congressional district---and it had to be Florida again. In Florida s 13th Congressional district, there is a big fuss about who really won.  Now I think it is pretty clear at this point that Vernon Buchanan, the Republican, won.  But we will have to go through the process to determine that for certain.  But Miss Jennings, who was the Democratic opponent, has refused to give up, has filed suit in the State Courts; they are working through that.  She wants to see source code for the computers that were used in the election. Obviously, the proprietor who owned the machines was not willing to do that. The compromise that was basically reached by the court was to get some outside experts in.  </P> <P>Under the court s supervision, they---these are computer science experts from the University of Florida, Florida and several other states, and they just issued the report very recently, just the past week or so.  And these are 8 experts from across the country, two of them are very, very knowledgeable in computer balloting.  They have examined hundreds of different computers.  And their verdict was there is absolutely no evidence of any error in the ballot count done by the machines; no error, I should say, with the source code.</P> <P>That doesn t necessarily settle it.  Ms. Jennings is still pursuing the issue in the courts and we may eventually have to have a contested case involvement of the Committee in which I am the ranking member at this time.  So we will see what the result is, but certainly, I think it has weakened her case considerably.  When the experts are saying it is not a source code problem, then the question is what caused it?  The interesting thing, too, is immediately the way the public picks up on in, and for whatever reason.  </P> <P>I was amused.  I am a charter member of Common Cause.  Most people are surprised that there are any Republicans left who are members of Common Cause. But I joined when John Gardner founded it; I still think it is a good organization.  But I recently received a fund raising letter from them and the letter stated that more than 18,000 votes went missing in reference to the under-vote [sounds like] in Florida s 13 district. Well, if you say that, that implies that the votes actually existed and somehow they disappeared. </P> <P>Let me give you some evidence.  This does not pertain directly to the Florida case, but the number of errors that the public manages to make is horrendous.  And I am well aware of that from my many years of experience at all levels of government and watching different elections.  It is just amazing, the number of errors made by the public and also, surprisingly, sometimes by poll workers; but mostly by the public.  And I was furious when the Florida event happened and we started talking about preparing a bill, which became the HAVA bill, Help America Vote Act.  When everyone talked about, Well, we have to design a good system and we have to train the poll workers and have to train the voters to use it.  Which my response is Utter, complete, total nonsense. You cannot train the public to do a task that they only do once or twice a year and expect them to remember the training and to vote perfectly.   My emphasis has always been design the machines, whatever system you use, so that you do not have to be trained.  And, in particular, I immediately wrote a bill after the Florida issue to deal with the technical aspects because there are a lot of technical aspects, and set up a program where what used to be the National Bureau of Standards, now National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is in charge of setting standards in this country and leads the world in standard setting---let them set the standards that voting machines have to have.  And I laid out very specifically what I wanted those standards to include.  One factor was human - the human factor.  How can we design the machines, whatever type they are, to minimize human error because there are all kinds of human errors that occur?  A lot of attention has been paid to the district I referenced in Florida; approximately 13 percent or 18,000 votes.  There was a drop-off from the US Senate race to the Congressional race in that district of 18,000 votes.  That is a lot of votes.  And I was puzzled by it, too.  I have seen a lot of errors made by people, but that seemed to me a large error rate.  The minute I saw the ballot, I knew what the problem was.  If you look at the ballot design---unfortunately, we only have only page two here.  I discovered at the last minute that we [indiscernible] not [indiscernible] page one.  I apologize for that.  But page one was filled with names for the US Senate race, a lot of names.  And then, page two at the top, short space, the congressional race, below that, again, a long list of names for the governor.  A voter seeing the long list on page one and then seeing page two sort of scrunched up at the top---and this does not really portray really what it looked like, looking at the screen.  I can easily say many would skip over the US House race.  Another problem is the lack of putting the line above the first name.  I think that visually is a problem because if you saw that you would immediately recognize, well, there are two lines of voting.  This it looks like, well, there is a name up on top that is sort of part of the heading.  Then there is one person there.  Why bother to vote if there is only one person?  I do not know what went into the voters minds, but I can easily imagine voters messing up when they have a ballot design like that.  Just to show you it is not unusual, we had recent testimony before the Senate Rules Committee investigating this as part of the paper trail issue.  Los Angeles County registrar Connie McCormack reminded us that in 1976 there was a drop-off of 300,000 votes between the presidential and US Senate races just in LA County; 300,000 votes; 13.8 percent of the vote.  That is on higher under-vote than we have in the Jennings case.  Another example: the drop off from president to US Senate in Sarasota County, Florida in that year was 10.7 percent; twelve years later, again, in Sarasota County, there is a drop of 12.6 percent between the presidential and the US Senate race.  This is not unusual to have drop-offs.  People come in to vote for some--- their real interest in the president usually, but it could be a governor, and just say, Why do I bother with the rest?  I do not care.   So, that sort of thing does happen.  In addition---well, I will get to that a bit later.  I'm going to talk about the optical scan system and the paper ballots there and some of the errors there.  What about our legislative agenda?  The Sarasota cases, of course---initially the process is it initially goes to the state courts and then if the contestant, which is the loser in the election, is not satisfied with the results in state courts, they can appeal to the House of the Representatives.  A contested case election issue is formed in the committee, which I am the ranking member at the House Committee on Administration.  And then it our responsibility to deal with it and in a quasi-legal, but mostly legal, way.  But usually, I would say 90 percent of the contests are dismissed almost immediately.  They are generally not very well-founded.  If the Jennings case reaches us, obviously, it is a major one.  It will not be decided quickly or immediately.  I still do not know if it will reach us.  We will have to wait and see.  But because it may reach us, I cannot say too much about that particular case.  </P> <P>The real problem with us---that every time it has happened, voter confidence is shaken.  That is, I think, a very tragic result because such an issue is made of it in the press and discussions in the public.  People say once again they have another reason not to vote: Why should I vote?  I cannot trust the machines, anyway.  I cannot trust the ballots.  We do not know if they are counted right.   I think, based on my experience---and I know there is a Secretary State of Indiana here.  There are probably a lot of other election people here.  In all of my experience, secretaries of state, county clerks, city clerks are extremely conscientious about the voting and the ballot.  They work very, very hard to get accurate results and once the vote is made, they work very, very hard to count it accurately looking at all possible errors.  </P> <P>So, by all means, do not blame election officials.  They really try hard.  They really know what they are doing.  Let me talk just briefly a minute about --one other thing; this is in regard to paper ballots, which I myself just assumed was a great answer to it.  In Michigan, Secretary of State Terri Land decided the best thing was to have a paper ballot which was counted by the computer and tallied by the computer.  So you vote on a paper ballot, you fill in the ovals, put it in the computer; the computer tallies it, records it, counts it, et cetera.  That struck me as a being a very good system because it tends to be accurate.  The voters are not doing a touch screen, which many of them are not familiar with.  They are actually filling out a paper ballot which historically is still the most accurate method; and then it is counted electronically, which ensures accuracy, speed, et cetera.  So, I always thought that was a great system until I started looking into this as a result of looking at this particular case.  Los Angeles Times did a story under the headline Election 2000: Many voters simply did it wrong.   And they looked at the results.  They reviewed 175,010 uncounted ballots; 61,000 of those were under-votes, but the interesting thing is 113,820 were over-votes.  People not only forget to vote for one particular office; they frequently vote for more people than they should and that can also be a problem.  If they do that, their ballot on that office is automatically discounted.  What was particularly interesting to me---and they were using an optically scanned paper ballot.  Of those who voted on paper optical scanned ballots, 3,616 people, whether they were voting for president, which is a primary office, there were 10 candidates listed.  Thirty-six hundred and sixteen people darkened nine of the 10 ovals and left President Bush s blank.  Now, how do you interpret that as an election official trying to count that?  Is it perhaps that they just did not know how to do it and they were really voting for President Bush so the dark meant they were erasing all the other candidates?  Or, on the other hand, where they saying anybody but Bush?  How do you know?  All you can is discard the ballot.</P> <P>Voters make a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistaken assumptions.  I was astounded two years ago---as I mentioned we had punched card ballots in my district and they always worked pretty well.  Then, to make it even better, they put a computer there, a card reader and computer.  After you voted, you put your ballot into that, and then it would pop out.  If it was okay, you just gave it to the registrar and they put it in the ballot box.  If it was wrong, it would send a message that you committed an error.  And I made an error on one.  I'm voting for judges.  There are four judges listed.  I thought we were supposed to vote for two.  We only had to vote for one.  I voted for two.  The think kicked back to me.  I did another ballot [indiscernible] it was fine.  And that is what I like about that type of system - you know immediately whether or not you are making an error.  </P> <P>Now, by giving these errors with the optical scan, do not think that I am saying that is a bad system.  I'm just pointing out that what I personally think is the best system, a paper ballot filled up personally by the voter, counted by the computer and with the paper and the computer result available for recounting struck me as being the best approach.  And then, when you get 3,600 people making that mistake on the presidential vote, which is the easiest vote, generally, the first one, I begin to wonder if there is any [indiscernible].  But, also, I'm very upset with the people who automatically assume that computers are not a good safe way to do it; and that is part of what is behind the paper ballot.  In my experience in meeting with constituents on this, many of them either have a political agenda or they are elderly and they do not make use of the computer.  </P> <P>Now, more and more elderly people are using computers.  But then, they simply do not trust them with ballot information, and that is another aspect of this.  So, I'm not sure where all of this is going to go.  I find it amusing that after all the fuss in Florida and the Supreme Court made a decision, I still have constituents - and I expect every congressman does - who are absolutely, totally, completely convinced that the Supreme Court stole the election from Al Gore and gave it to George Bush.  This in spite of the fact that a group of newspapers spent over $200,000 counting manually every ballot for president in the state of Florida and concluding that, yes, in fact, George Bush did win.  Also, ironically, concluded that if Al Gore had tried a recount [indiscernible] instead of just the areas he wanted, he might have won just because the out-state areas give him more votes than he expected whereas the areas he thought he would do well did not.  So, it is ironic that George Bush really did win the election.  Some people still do not believe it in spite of an outside group, namely, of highly reputable newspapers painfully counting every vote to see where they are.  </P> <P>So, what concerns me is we spent $4 billion now from the federal government given to the states and the communities to buy new voting systems.  Now, suddenly, there is this big uprising that says, Throw them away, throw them away, or just hanging a paper printer on the side and that will settle the problem.  Neither one solves the problem.  We have good voting systems in place properly used in most states.  I would prefer, as I said earlier, much more emphasis should have been put on human factors. </P> <P>I am not pleased that the bill I established to create the standards did not receive immediate attention simply because the chairman of the committee wanted it tied to HAVA, and I kept insisting we need the standards before we spend $4 billion.  And I lost the battle; they were tied together.  And so the standards preparation did not even begin until after HAVA had passed, and I do not think the standards were in place long enough and properly enough to make certain that all the equipment met the standards.  And particularly I'm worried about the human factors issue.  </P> <P>Human factors apply not just to the design of the computer but, as you can see, ballot design as well; and it is very hard to set a standard for that.  Perhaps you can set some principles, but not standards.  Well, all of this -- just one final comment from Dan Keating of the Washington Post.  And as a Republican, I generally do not quote the Post that often.  But when there are occasions when they agree with me, I do.  The [indiscernible] from Dan Keating, and it is a very good---who presented the findings of the National Opinion Research Center Study: Spending hundreds of million of dollars on new technology will not prevent voter errors if ballots or computer screens are confusing or if voters are not given accurate guidance.  Attendance must be paid to ballot design and testing, rather than assuming that spending for new technology will solve the problems.   To that, I say Amen. .  </P> <P>So, the solution, I think, is clear - to do precisely what he says.  Work on that side of the issue, but also develop redundant systems for recounts.  And it can be two separate computer systems that deal with it, that analyze the recorded votes separately to get away from [indiscernible] have any error in the source code in one computer.  It is virtually impossible to have a serious source code error if you are using two of them simultaneously.  And there are ways to do it with computers.  There are ways to do it with paper.  As I said, the optical scanned ballot, I think, is a very good answer.  It is possible to do it with a printer attached to the side of a computer-driven system if you properly engineer it.  You do not just go to Office Depot and buy the standard printer, but you buy one that is specifically engineered and is error-proof as you can possibly make a mechanical system.  There are lots of different ways to do it.  The point is simply make sure the system is properly designed.  Make sure the human factors are cared for, and make sure that you have redundancy of some sort.  And by then, you will have done most you can do to get an actual count.  You are still going to have a lot of human errors on the part of voters.  You have to live with that.  And we can at least reduce the errors that are committed either by the system or by the election personnel operating the system or designing and printing the ballot.  Thank you very much.  I have a few minutes for questions. </P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  We have a mic here and also we can identify yourselves for [indiscernible].  So, why don t we start over here.</P> <P>Sam Hirsch [phonetic]:  My name is Sam Hirsch.  I'm an attorney with Jenner and Block.  I represent Christine Jennings in the Florida 13th contest.  First, I want to applaud the Congressman for calling for more studies of ballot design and voting technologies.  Generally, I think we need that and I think that is the right way to go.  There were some factual points I would like to straighten out that I think were a little bit inaccurate.  There is not a 13-percent under-vote rate in these electronic machines; it is 15 percent.  It is 13 percent county.  Why?  Because a large fraction of the county voted on absentee paper ballots.  They had only a two-and-a-half percent under-vote rate in this congressional race.  Similarly, there are four other counties in the district.  They had only a two-and-a-half percent under-vote in this race.  Four years ago, in the last midterm election in the congressional ballot, there was only a two-and-a-half percent under-vote rate even on the electronic ballots in Sarasota County.  For the ballot right below, the gubernatorial that you are looking at there and right above on the electronic screening to the senate race, it was one-and-a-half percent.  </P> <P>So, the fact that it was 15 percent in this one county on the electronic ballots only really does stand out.  And I think the examples of big roll-off from a presidential ballot to a senate ballot are not really comparable because we all know there are people in our presidential election who turned out just to vote for president.  I think we can all judge for ourselves whether that is a slightly confusing ballot, a not-at-all confusing ballot, a highly confusing ballot.  But I would like to say that we all remember, I think, the Palm Beach County ballot from 2000 where there were candidates on both sides and you had to punch down the middle; it was very confusing.  There the total percentage of people confused was no more than five percent.  So, if this is 15 percent confusion, it is quite odd.</P> <P>Then, I also want to correct some errors about what has been going on in the litigation.  The Congressman said that outside experts under the court supervision had reached a unanimous conclusion.  That is incorrect, sir.  They are outside experts hired by one of the defendants in the case.  They work for the state of Florida; they are not under the court s supervision and they were not, anyway, directed by the court.  You also mentioned that they examined hundreds of different computers.  </P> <P>In fact, when the team was being assembled, a Princeton computer scientist, Ed Felten, refused to join because he was denied access to hardware.  These people were given only the source code and they were told, Read to the source code and see if [indiscernible] it looks like a grammatical error, essentially.   </P> <P>So, they had to do what they call a static review rather than a dynamic review that allows them to actually execute the code and see if it is really working properly.  Now, I come here as an advocate.  I represent a candidate in the contest.  And lastly, I would like to say that the House has a special quasi-judicial function here.  They serve as the federal court in a house election contest and, in particular, the committee that Congressman Ehlers serves on is a quasi-judicial body here.  It is not serving in its legislative function.  There is a pending case brought by my client in front of this committee and I was frankly appalled to hear a member of the committee in public saying, before any of the evidence is in, but after the case has been filed, I think it is pretty clear Vernon Buchanan has really won.   </P> <P>That is what the case is about and we are seeking access to the same source code and hardware that the other [indiscernible] experts have some access to.  And until we are able to look at that, bring our evidence to the committee, have the other side bring its evidence to the committee, we are in a pending case here.  If a federal judge or a state judge got a pending case in front of them, came to a public forum and announced the result, I think we would be appalled.  We know Supreme Court nominees do not even talk about potentially upcoming cases, much the less pending ones when they testify in front of Congress.  </P> <P>And I just ask you publicly, Congressman, in the future, would you please exercise some restraint, encourage your colleagues to do so, too, to keep an open mind, listen to the evidence when the time for evidence comes and then reach a conclusion about who actually won this election.</P> <P>Vernon J. Ehlers:  Thank you very much and I appreciate your clarifying the issue.  I was not intending to cast aspersions.  I was just trying to use as an example to lead into the other examples I gave and I apologize if I gave the wrong impression.</P> <P>Michael Grant:  Thank you very much.  Good morning, Congressman.  You opened up with a very - I'm sorry.  My name is Michael Grant and I'm with TruVote International.  Sir, you opened up with a statement that voter confidence is very important, that we must get voter confidence.  And then you said, but the errors are common place and that when you heard about Florida you thought, well, what else is new?  </P> <P>I guess what I would like to ask you, sir, is this.  If it were possible to have a DRE, the designs, ballots that are simple where you minimize human error, where there is redundancy, you have the vote on DRE but you have the paper ballot also as a trail.  There is open source code, there is accessibility for those with handicaps, and the paper printer is designed as such that there is quality in the printer, but there is also quality in the paper, would you, sir, support that type of approach to votee?</P> <P>Vernon J. Ehlers:  As I said, the main thing is to have accurate, reliable redundancy.  And I do not particularly care what type it is.  I said, at the end, that you can undoubtedly even if you properly --- if you have a paper roll printer along the side of the computer, if you get it from Office Depot, I would not trust it.  If you specifically designed it for this purpose and you designed it well, that is certainly an option.  My main point is you should not simply regard a paper trail -- oh, I am sorry ---redundancy is being restricted to a paper trail and you should not consider a paper trail to be restricted to a printer hanging on the side of the computer.  </P> <P>As I said, I think at the moment, probably the most fail-safe method is the optical-scanned ballot filled up by the voter and counted by the computer.  Probably, that is the best thing we have available right now.  But there is no reason we cannot design better systems than that.</P> <P>Susan Greenhall [phonetic]:  Thank you, Congressman.  I'm Susan Greenhall with Vote Trust USA and I appreciate your recognition of the value of an optical scanner.  Many groups like ours, which advocate for paper records prefer optical scan for the various reasons that you are speaking off.  So, point of information.  I would like to clarify that a precinct count optical scanner that you are talking about gives you the opportunity to correct an over-vote or under-vote in the same way we will kick it back.  [Indiscernible] the voter would fill out the [indiscernible], put the ballot into the scanner right there.  If it is over voted or under voted, the machine will kick it back, give you the same opportunity or punch card it, and solve that problem of people misreading the ballot.  </P> <P>One other point of information from the study that you cited in Cleveland where they found that the paper records had a 10 percent error compared to the hard drive total.  There is also other redundancies built into those touch screen systems and they found the other computerized redundancy systems did not match up either.  So, there was a problem also often with relying on a hard drive redundancy because there were four different hard drive redundancies in that study and none of them matched up.  And so, you are kind of again saying what the right total.  </P> <P>And now, I'll get to my question.  In Sarasota County, there was a great deal of reports from voters in early voting prior to the election and on election day as well to the local board of elections to local media, newspapers, and radio, and also to the local election or form group that voters had found Christine Jennings name on the ballot and had tried to vote for her and then it would not come up on the summary screen.  And then, many of these people also actually testified at a hearing sponsored by People for the American Way.  Have you reviewed any of these testimonies or are you familiar with that, the records of people that claim that they found it, they voted, and then it did not show up on the summary screen?</P> <P>Vernon J. Ehlers:  I have read that not in any detail yet because we are not yet dealing with the contested case before our committee.  There has been a request for it.  But normally, we do not even begin action until the state courts have acted.  And once they have completed their work, then, our committee will start taking over.  I have read an article just last week on this in which someone had pointed out a good careful analysis had been done of a particular election of all the different methods of counting and compiling of votes and everything.  And almost every way they counted it, a series of times, never once that they get the same vote.  There were always different votes and it could be for various reasons improperly filling up the ballot so that one machine reads it one way, the other machine reads it a different way.  The errors did not seem to be centered on the computer per se as on the way it was used and the way the printers were used.  </P> <P>So, there is plenty of opportunity for error in addition to what I think is the biggest source of error and that is the errors the voters themselves make for whatever reason.  Either they do not care or they just want to vote selectively or they simply vote the wrong way.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  I'm going to accurately count one more question.  So, there is one out there.  All right, here we go and that is the last question.  Mic coming over.</P> <P>Male Voice:  To move often with the Sarasota question for just a moment, I have seen several bills introduced in both houses over the last few weeks.  When do you expect your committee to start considering some of this legislation?</P> <P>Vernon J. Ehlers:  I cannot say.  If I were still the chairman I would say.</P> <P>Male Voice:  Understood.</P> <P>Vernon J. Ehlers:  Just one thing about being in the minority, if you really do not have much to do [indiscernible].  So, I would suggest you address that to the new chairwoman, Juanita Millender-McDonald.  She is taking charge.  She is a very fine person, a very good person.  I have worked with her for years on a number of things.  So, I think we will have a good relationship throughout this if it reaches the contested case level in the Congress.  Let me also just conclude by saying, I have a prepared speech, which as usual I did not stick to and would have gotten in far less trouble with the attorney over there had I done so.  But I have always--- been an ex-professor, I like to speak extemporaneously or as some of my students -- well, my students have a less elegant term for it.  But anyway, I apologize for any discrepancies for you or anyone else, but we will have the written text displayed on.  It will be put up in our website in a few days as soon as we get it entered.  </P> <P>Thank you very, very much first all for your interest and secondly for your patience in listening to me and I continue to be impressed with what a marvelous country the United States of America is, that everyone really wants their voice to be heard and they do not ask anything of us, but that when they vote, they can vote accurately and that their vote be counted. </P> <P>And my goal is very simple: To make sure that every person in this country has access to the ballot and that they can be assured that their vote will be counted accurately.  And that has two sides: One, counting votes accurately; secondly, making sure that there are no votes that are recorded improperly, which is an oversight that not very many people pay attention to, but it does happen and I have seen it happen.  So, working together I hope we can achieve that goal so that every citizen in this country can be assured their vote counts exactly the way they planned it to count.  Thank you very much.</P> <P> </P> <P> </P> <P>[Panel II: What s Brewing for Election Reform?]</P> <P> </P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  We are going to actually going to start right off, there is no break.  If people will take their seats, please.  The Sergeant-at-Arms will intervene if we do not take our seats immediately.  Well, for many years when I would begin my discussion of this subject, I would say election reform is not rocket science, but with the involvement Rush Holt and Vernon Ehlers, we cannot say that anymore.  Our third panel is a more direct look ahead at where reform might be going, particularly in Congress but I think we also want to look a little bit more broadly.  </P> <P>And we have three people who have been tracking certainly what is going on in Washington very, very closely.  Starting closest to us, Doug Chapin, closest to me, is the director of electionline.org, which is a terrific non-partisan, non-advocacy website that everybody who follows election reform turns to on a regular basis.  Doug has a deep background in election issues as a lawyer serving on the Hill and in other ways.  Zach Goldfarb is the national political researcher at the Washington Post.  He writes about a wide range of things in American politics but has done the bulk of their coverage on election reform and related issues.  Tom Mann is W. Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, co-director along with me of the Election Reform Project here at AEI and also with an extensive record in these areas.  </P> <P>Looking ahead, we have already seen from the first panel and the discussion by Congressman Ehlers some of the issues that we have to think about as we look forward.  Among them is whether HAVA is now going to be reconsidered, rejiggered, amended or dealt with in any direct fashion.  Whether HAVA will, in fact, be fully-funded, partially-funded or not funded at all as we continue to have a series of issues moving forward that are critical in terms of even making HAVA itself work as it now exists from the statewide databases on through the training and expansion of poll workers and on through other questions about whether there will be funding for states to experiment with things like vote centers and the like.  </P> <P>We have the question that Rick Hasen brought up earlier of whether there will be any movement towards non-partisan voter election administration, either emanating from individual states, or as some members of Congress have suggested, moving from the top down.  We have lots of questions about voting machines from the Holt bill that Rush Hold has put in for a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail that now has close to a majority of Members of the House's co-sponsors and a significant amount of momentum in the Senate.  And of course, we also had a hearing just the other day that took up additional bills.  Senator Barack Obama's bill to create a democracy index and Chris Dodd, one of the original architects of HAVA, with a bill to do something that moves well beyond it.  So, with those and perhaps other issues on the agenda, let us start perhaps with Doug giving your sense of the lay of the land.  Where are we and where are we going?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  Thank you very much, Norm.  It is an honor to be here.  It is especially an honor to see a roomful of people.  I would describe myself as an election geek and I think, to a certain extent, that connotes a sense of loneliness, that you are one of a few people who actually cares about the issue, and I can say with confidence that the rank of election geekdom grows daily and I think this room is proof of that.  So thank you for both the invitation and the opportunity.  </P> <P>Talking about the lay of the land in election reform, I want to hearken it back to something that I said way back in 2002 when electionline.org was in its infancy and talked about the potential for problems.  And I said, Comparing elections from 2002 to 2000 was like assessing the risk of a forest fire.   And I said that in 2002, the woods were not necessarily any drier but more people had matches.   The idea being that more people were aware of election problems across the country and as a result, were much more willing to challenge the process.  I think that analogy is apt but I would like to amend it in 2007 and beyond to say that even as matches multiply, the wood gets drier everyday.  We are in a tremendous period of change in the field of election reform and the field of election administration.  </P> <P>Just to give you an example, across the country we have 12 new Secretaries of State, 11 of whom were elected, one of whom was appointed by a governor.  They divide seven Republican, five Democrat.  Those new Secretaries of State, in many cases, ran on, campaigned on election issues that were very much in their voters' minds.  And they also come to their jobs without the sense of what they are and are not either allowed or able to accomplish.  And so we have begun to see people across the country at least thinking out loud about different ideas.  And they bring a tremendous range of experience.  You have Deborah Bowman in California who is a long-time legislator who is now Secretary of State.  In Colorado, you have Mike Coffman, former State Treasurer who went to Iraq to serve and has now been elected Secretary of State.  You can only imagine the kind of insights he might have on accessing overseas voters to the ballot.  You have Jennifer Brunner in Ohio replacing one of the most controversial Secretaries of State, Ken Blackwell of Ohio.  And those three and others have hit the ground in many ways, running, proposing new ideas, thinking out loud, pushing the field in ways that sometimes it is not always prepared to go.  At the same time, we see tremendous changes in Congress.  </P> <P>The two Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate meet a very different environment for election reform in this Congress.  Congressman Ehlers rightfully points out that the shift from the majority to the minority can be jarring and certainly involves a bit of a job description change, but the opposite is just as true.  Now that Democrats are in charge of Congress and in our little corner of the woods, the Committees of Jurisdiction, they have not only the responsibility but the duty of leading the debate on Capitol Hill and we started to see questions of voting technology, of voter registration and the like in Washington D.C.  </P> <P>At the same time, we are seeing tremendous changes in the non-governmental community.  The advocacy community in many ways is maturing and changing in ways that might have been unforeseen as recently as two years ago.  A very good example of that is in the area of the Paper Trail Debate.  I think until the 2006 election, it was a fair characterization to say that most advocates who favored some kind paper in the process were willing to settle for a paper trail or as Congressman Ehler said, A printer attached to a voting machine.   </P> <P>Since the 2006 election, and since specifically the Florida-13 election, there has been a bit of a rift in the advocacy community.  You are now seeing some advocates maintaining their support for a paper trail and thus, the legislation like Congressman Holt s in the House, but you are seeing others advocating just as strongly for paper ballots, who believe that the paper needs to be the ballot itself and not just a trail and there is also legislation to that effect.  What is interesting in this period of change is that Congress is coming around to some kind of a consensus on the issue just as the advocacy community and the election community is beginning [indiscernible] again on how the process will work.  I think, from where I sit and for what it is worth, that the center of gravity, that the impetus on election reform is not going to be in Washington D.C.  It is going to be in state capitals across the country; whether it be Secretaries of State, state legislators or even local legislatures and election administrators, change is going to happen on the ground where elections are carried out.  </P> <P>And one issue that I want to put on the table before I turn it over to my colleagues on the panel is the notion of real-world elections and the real problems that election officials and voters face.  If you go to electionline.org, and I recommend it highly everyday, you see a steady drumbeat increasing of nitty-gritty individual problem stories from the states.  We had a story two days ago and I apologize I missed Secretary Rokita.  I do not know if he had mentioned it, but there is a vendor in Indiana who has literally gone out of business, shuttered its doors and there are four counties that used that company's machines that have no idea how they will program those machines for the next election.  There is a county in Pennsylvania that had an unfortunate water leak at a storage facility and something like 20 of their touch-screen machines were not doused but liberally sprayed with water.  They mistakenly then moved those back into general inventory and now the vendor wants to charge them something on the order of $100,000-plus to recalibrate all of the machines to make sure that none of the machines were damaged by water.  Those are the kinds of nitty-gritty individual problems that legislators and election officials have to confront everyday.  And I suspect that those kinds of problems, more so than the debate in the Senate Rules Committee or the House Committee or the Committee on House Administration, those will drive the debate in a much more meaningful way.  </P> <P>What is necessary to make that work?  I think Rick Hasen and others have pointed it out accurately.  We need better access to empirical data.  We need to get beyond what I call the religious debate on issues like the paper trail or voter ID and voter intimidation.  We need hard data to start the conversation.  The thing to remember, though, is that the data does not end the conversation.  I mean, even the question and answer following Congressman Ehler's presentation demonstrates that even when you have data, as we do in many cases in the Sarasota case, it does not necessarily solve the problem but gives us something different to debate about.  But at least having empirical rather than anecdotal data to focus on will drive reform in a meaningful way not just in Washington, not just in state capitals but in the hundreds of thousands of polling places across the country where Americans come together at least once a year usually to do the business of democracy.</P> <P>I'll close as I always do, electionline.org, it is not just our name, it is our web address.  We are available everyday with news from across the country.  If it is happening out there, more than likely it will be showing up on our site.  We hope you will join us, we hope you will share your ideas with us and we look forward to continuing the dialog in the months and years ahead.  Thank you.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Thank you.  Zach?</P> <P>Zachary Goldfarb:  Good morning.  It is very nice to be here as well.  I want to tackle this from two angles basically.  As opposed to the great [indiscernible] that Doug has and many people in the room have, I want to give you a sense of how I think the press tries to convey this information to the general populace and also what some of the sort of political questions that arise and that are arising from this are.  For the press, I think, and there was some discussion about this in the last panel, the problem has been that many of the issues that come up seem very much theoretical or potential and unlike other questions of airline security which is probably just as important as election security, you have airline security everyday and you have elections, you have tasks every two years.  And so that has been the problem, I think, for the press is dealing with theoretical question which has, of course, practical implications but for most of the time they are theoretical.  </P> <P>So I dipped into this issue for the first time in January of 2006, not very long ago.  And I sort of surveyed what was out there, what was being discussed and the big issue seemed to be, Were the machines safe?   There was a great emphasis everywhere on whether the machines could be tampered, whether they could be hacked, whether they were simply reliable and without sort of evil intentions.  So that was really the focus, I think, in a lot of the media for the first few months of last year leading up to the 2006 election.  And that started to change when you had breakdowns in Cook County in Illinois and later in September in Montgomery County nearby in Maryland where I think it was revealed that it was not so much the technology that was the problem but it was poll worker training that was the problem.</P> <P>Election officials getting used to using these new machines and so there was still the growing awareness, I think, in the media of the technology posing a new kind of problem.  That was much harder to grip than just a machine not working or a machine being hacked but a broad-based problem of our aging poll worker populace, poll workers who do not know how to use computers very well.  I remember I attended a poll worker training class in Cleveland and that morning they were being trained and the spindles of paper, they had paper trails, the spindles of paper were bowling on the floor, the poll workers were having trouble plugging in one machine to the other and this is not because these poll workers are not smart but many of them were senior citizens and it just takes time since they are not used to it, the technology to get used to it and it was happening very fast, in a few hours.  And so I think that was a growing realization over the past year.  And the problems have to do with the training and communication of these machines to the general populace.  </P> <P>On the other hand, the 2006 midterms were largely seen, I think, as the big test of this new technology.  And what we saw was not too many problems occurred.  You had Sarasota, it was really a huge problem obviously but elsewhere you did not have that many problems.  And so for the media, media always likes [indiscernible] clear problems but the media, they look for specific examples of implications of problems and maybe if the Democratic margin in the House had been 14 votes, you would have been completely different.  But because there was a healthy margin in the House, you did not have that kind of concern.  Since then, though, I think you are seeing sort of lingering echoes of the midterm election.  In addition to Sarasota, you had a lot of concerns over Sequoia voting machines and who were they owned by.  You have Diebold considering shedding its voting machine division.  You had the EAC barring temporarily a testing lab from certifying these machines.  And so it is a sort of an echo chamber of new concerns that have come up since the midterms. </P> <P>But I think in communicating this to the general public, you are still not going to see a lot of coverage of this area for quite a while, probably until another year.  And I know you find it very frustrating but it is very hard from a reporter's perspective, you have editors asking you, What is new here? and it very hard and I think the challenge to the election community will be how do we communicate the seriousness of this issue at a time when --a long time until the next election.</P> <P>And that sort of relays into my second point which is about the politics of the situation.  Obviously, in 2008 it will be eight years after the Florida fiasco and it will be four years after Ohio which there were many concerns about but ultimately, I think, the general consensus among many people was that did not rise to the level of any kind of fraud or corruption or any need for a new election.  Primaries for next year are moving up in time.  We can see New Hampshire and various other primaries move up.  Florida, California and other big states are considering front-loading the elections in early February and that really means if Congress is going to take any action or if local officials are going to take any action on this subject, there is really very little time left to do that.  </P> <P>Talking about Congress, Senator -- some of the presidential contenders are making this an issue to some degree.  Senator Obama has introduced legislation that Senator Clinton just the other day with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones introduced legislation.  You have the Holt bill and the House moving forward and you have Senator Feinstein who is chair of the Rules Committee which is planning to introduce resolutions sometime in the next few weeks.  And as Doug mentioned, the Democrats do seem to be more committed to this issue or do seem to want to take more action on the issue than has been taken before.  </P> <P>But, I mean, from a realist's point of view, they have the war, they have all these other issues and it just seems very --- like a distant possibility that there will be actually -- you have legislation in the House and the Senate, they are both passed and the president signs it.  It seems like it could be a formidable challenge for that to occur.  And also if there is going to be legislation requiring paper trails, I think Holt's bill appropriates $300 million for that, to help the states pay for that and the Congress has now pay-for-it regulations, where they have to find money for everything they are paying for, they are going to appropriate and that could be a challenge.  And so, I think, the course ahead in Congress can still be pretty troubled in terms of getting any action done on this issue.</P> <P>I'll close with just some discussion in the states.  I very much agree with Doug that anything that we actually see will actually happen in the states in the next few months to a year.  From the political perspective, I think, with the voter ID issue, that could easily merge over the next few months with immigration questions that will come up within the states and get involved with that topic which is obviously very emotional and polarizing in parts of the country.  </P> <P>Paper trails, I agree that more states will consider paper trails [indiscernible] sort of an upcurve in the number of states that are requiring them.  But here in Virginia, Cane is about to sign that legislation for paper trail or to not for paper trails but to replace the electronic logging machines and [indiscernible] he is delaying on that.  And then I agree that there will a lot more pressure on state election officials and Secretaries of State to avoid partisan affiliation or partisan racist or taking any position in campaigns.  And that was the number one recommendation, I believe, of the Baker-Carter Commission and so I definitely expect that to be pressed ahead in the coming two years.  Thanks.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Thank you, Zach.  Tom?</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  Thank you, Norm.  If I may just initially say a word on behalf of our AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project to really thank those folks who have participated on our panels and to Congressman Ehlers, it has been very interesting and very instructive to me and I thank you all for coming.  Rick Hasen made a couple of references to Tom putting the caboche on various of his ambitious reform agenda items saying that I said they were non-starters.  </P> <P>I want to sort of clarify that I think Rick has put his finger on a world somewhere in the future.  I just cannot figure out how to get to it yet.  That is to say universal registration and voter IDs and non-partisan administration of elections are objectives to be sought.  But as I listened today I was struck again by how apt the movie Rashomon remains.  It is amazing to me to see the extent to which honorable, decent, intelligent, able people view the world in profoundly different ways based on their own set of party lenses and values and life experiences.</P> <P>Listening to the Congressman sort of give the back of his hand to those who still have some pangs about Florida 2000 told me he did not end -- and the bits of evidence that he used, namely a newspaper recount which turns out to be much more complicated in its outcome or relating to Florida 13 or to say, as Todd did very confidently, well, voter ID s requirements increase voter confidence.  Well, maybe yes, maybe no.  </P> <P>My guess is that they increase voter confidence among Republicans and decrease voter confidence among Democrats.  The reality is that we live in a profoundly partisan era.  Our parties are not only deeply polarized in the ideological sense but they operate at a level of rough parity which means the stakes are so high in each election.  Politicians had been tempted to try to manipulate the rules of the game to stay in power or to acquire power and now that has been reinforced and it just pervades, it pervades all of public life.  It is certainly the case that the overriding debate about access versus integrity.  </P> <P>As we pointed out, Doug, in our first meetings after the Florida 2000 debacle was split along partisan lines and we did not see how that was going to change very quickly.  I mean I thought the evidence that Rick presented about the confidence levels, differences by party depending on whether you are a winner or a loser that year are pretty profound.  I also thought the report that someone of you gave about all of the voter ID requirements that have been passed in the states have been passed by Republican legislatures and presumably signed by Republican governors.  Now that is not an accident.  There is a belief that among Republicans that there is a lot of fraud out there and this is one way to deal with it while Democrats believe -- Doug referred to sort of the religious dimension of this that Democrats believe that there is serious access problems.  </P> <P>There is some evidence but not very good evidence yet but the evidence has a hard time of making its way into the debate which is one of the reasons why I urged some caution on using public confidence as a standard or voter confidence by which to act or to judge systems because I hate to tell you that it probably has less to do with the quality of the system of election administration than it has to do with how many really closely contested elections there are and how much they have an impact on the larger balance of power between the parties and that winners are going to view--- have different levels of confidence than losers and Democrats different than Republicans.  Again, your data, going back to an earlier period when there was not much difference between Democrats and Republicans and winners and losers.  </P> <P>But now the issue since Florida 2000 has become so salient and the stakes are so high.  There is such a level of distrust that in sort of my own view is that the change in that is going to have to come in the broader political environment, that it cannot be solved through election reform alone.  That does not mean we do not do our damnedest to work on that other side that Doug was talking about.  The practical problems of election administration where we can truly try to deal with some of these problems.  But we have to understand those probably will --- even making progress with those will not be sufficient when cumulated to have much impact on levels of voter confidence.</P> <P>Two other things I take away from today's discussion.  One is how do we judge between the inevitable imperfection of systems, the time needed to test and to implement systems versus systemic problems that exist, that need tending to.  I mean that is an issue that members of the EAC have to grapple with all the time, Secretaries of State, local officials.  And this gets me into the second point I want to make.  I would argue that, in general, Secretaries of State are a little too defensive on this score.  Even while their legislatures are moving ahead and passing all kinds of new laws because they believe there are some systemic problems that have to be dealt with, that is there is a legitimate question to be asked about national versus state responsibilities, that the reality is the constitution makes it possible for the federal government to play a much more active role if they choose to in this.  And yet the tradition, of course, and the expense and responsibility is one that has been borne by state and local government.  But I have a sense that we are never going to go back to the era in which, well, if you want to do it that way in your state and that way in your state or locality, that is fine, that is the way it is.  And the more we can nudge them into a more open and serious discussion of these issues, the better off we would all be.  </P> <P>Now the bottom line and my concluding comment having to do with the agenda is that if you accept what I have argued here--- and you may well not, but if you do, it leads me to believe that the efforts in Congress to amend HAVA, to require Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails, to establish voter ID requirements will probably be frustrated by partisan differences and of the existence of filibuster possibility in the Senate.  </P> <P>Let me just say on the VVPAT, the states have really taken the lead on this.  And it is extraordinary, the extent of activity and electionline.org which is our resource on so many things in this area has a wonderful up-to-date chart in which they report just what the state of play is across our 50 states on this.  This is one area where slowing the process down may make good sense in Congress because the last thing you want to get is a system that will soon be obsolete and is prone to breakdown and error, being incorporated into federal law, frustrating efforts to deal with it as new technology comes on board.  In any case, I think I agree with Doug.  It is a time when we are going to have a lot of talk but the talk and debate in Washington is going to be more partisan and therefore not lead to much that the action is in the states and in the implementation of the law in the efforts of groups outside to monitor the process.  Thanks.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Thank you so much Tom.  Before we move on, I want to make one announcement before everybody leaves.  The next event we are going to have here as part of our Election Reform Project, is going to be on March 26th at 10 a.m.  Mexico had a very interesting election itself, with continuing reverberations about whether it was conducted fairly or whether it was administered in a straightforward fashion. </P> <P>We are very fortunate to have Dr. Luis Carlos Hugalde, who is the president of the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, the person in-charge of administration of their elections, who will talk about election reform lessons from Mexico and then we will have an interesting discussion there along with electionline.org, at electionreformproject.org which is our website.  You can find information about that event and others and a whole that builds on what Doug has done.  Just a couple of comments.  First, following on Tom's, of course he is absolutely right that we are on a profoundly partisan era.  </P> <P>We are also in an era of parity between the parties, meaning that, well, there are always going to be elections that are very close.  The odds of having extraordinarily close elections at the federal or state level are probably greater now than they have been at other times.  And so we can segue from a Florida election in 2000 in which the presidential contest was divided by, at that first cut, 573 votes.  Just correcting one little comment that Congressman Ehlers made, as I recall, the study done by the Washington Post and other newspapers used 40 different decision rules counting all of the ballots just to look at how you would accept or reject ballots; 20 of them found that George Bush would have won the election and 20 of them found that Al Gore would have won.  Now, along with that, of course, we had the Washington State gubernatorial election.  We have the election in Sarasota and many others.  </P> <P>If you have a series of elections that are not close, errors, bias, problems, and machines are never going to be a focal point.  They are there.  They have always been there but we do not much care and we do not focus on them.  It is when this elections are close and you have an intensely partisan era and the stakes are high that this becomes even more important.  But it also becomes important not just because outcomes are going to be shaped by the system that you have but the level of confidence will rise or fall based on whether there is any sense that you have got a fair system.  </P> <P>And so, frankly, when I hear Secretaries of State, and this is one area where we have bipartisan reaction, brushing aside a lot of questions and saying things are largely hunky-dory and yes, there are little problems but there are always going to be little problems, it makes me very uneasy.  Because the fact is that problems at the margins here, now are extraordinarily important.  And if you have a shattered sense of confidence by voters, any sizable slice of voters in the system and Rick's tables from these election studies showed that it is there, then you can have an election outcome that sees half the electorate or a third of the electorate believing it is bogus, and you cannot survive that kind of dynamic in a political democracy for long.  </P> <P>So these are extremely important issues for us to take up.  One other comment following on what Tom said in terms of the different prisms through which we see these things, I recall a fascinating discussion at the Carter-Baker Commission, talking about voter fraud.  And of course, the commission recommended a voter ID although what they really did was to say we are going to get a voter ID, the real ID moving forward, now moving forward much less rapidly.  But as long as we are going to have a universal ID in the country, let us use it for election purposes.  </P> <P>But of course, the focus on the voter ID which was mostly on the fraud issue, was for ballots cast at the polls and we got to a discussion of absentee ballots where the standard was much lower.  It did not require a voter ID and where every study that we have ever had has shown that the potential for and the reality of voter fraud is much, much greater.  You lose the zone of privacy, you have ballots that can sit somewhere for weeks or months on end with no nobody exactly knowing who is in charge of them.  The possibility of deep-sixing ballots by somebody who did not--thought the outcomes might not be particularly amenable to their cause.  And that was brushed aside by those who were ardently in favor of the voter ID to take care of voter fraud because they were only looking at one kind of voter fraud and that really also had a partisan dimension to it.  </P> <P>Now having said that, let me just throw out a couple of questions that I would like the panelists to deal with, to start with.  The first is-- let me direct this to Doug.  With Florida now having moved very rapidly to saying, We are just going to go back to the old, tried and true optical scan, given what you see in other states, is that a harbinger of things to come?  Is that largely what we are going to find in the states, that they are nervous enough that in the short run, they are going to turn to a cheaper technology that they are more comfortable with?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  Yes, I think in many ways Florida is, at least, an indicator of the sorts of concerns that states and localities are going to have to face.  I must say, as someone in the job that I do, Florida plays the same function for us that, say, Britney Spears does for tabloid editors.  There is always something interesting coming out of Florida but I do not want - it was a cheap shot - but I do-- but Florida has all...</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  A cheap shot at who?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  You name it [indiscernible].  But Florida really has always been a poster child for reform, both in identifying problems and in responding to them.  And the current debate in Florida is instructive for many jurisdictions.  The voting technology there, looking at it, is not so much an unfunded mandate as it is a sunk cost.  They are holding hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of technology that they are now either afraid to use, does not work the way they think it should or they are taking tremendous political heat for having.  And so, Florida has moved in a very public and decisive way to address that concern.  They have put their sweaty palms on display as it were but Florida's are not the only palms that are sweaty.  </P> <P>There are other jurisdictions across the country that are sitting on technology that they are not sure either that they can trust or that their voters trust and how Florida does it--and remember Florida has just announced their plan to do it, has not actually appropriated the money, began to buy the machines or do any of that.  But those kind of concerns, I would not be surprised to see in other places across the country.  Do other states do the same thing where they scrap touch-screens in favor or optical scanning machines?  I do not think necessarily but I think confronting the notion of sunk costs in technology is something that lots of jurisdictions are going to follow Florida on in the foreseeable future.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Let me follow on with that.  When people talk about machines, they are talking about the reliability, inherent and otherwise that these machines --or even when Congressman Ehlers talks about the redundancy --and it does not have to be necessarily in the form of paper, they are often skipping past what is the real crunch point here, which is a recount.  A close election where the question is, Can you be sure and will voters be reassured that a recount can be done so that the results are actually accurate once?   As the Sarasota case among others shows, not having some kind of concrete ability to do a recount is a real problem here.  Is there any way to do that effectively without having some kind of paper trail whatever it may be?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  I honestly do not know. I do think that there is lots of academic debate out there as to whether or not one can do some sort of post-election assessment without some kind of a paper record.  I think that recounts really have two pieces that we need to take to look at.  The first is the evidence, what we use, whether it is a paper trail, a paper ballot, an electronic log, what have you.  But then there is also the forum.  And I am going to take this as an opportunity to plug.</P> <P>We have just released a case study on post-election audit laws and practice across the country and you are seeing more and more states doing essentially a de rigueur recount.  They are doing with every election, they are going to do some kind of post-election assessment.  And one of the things we took a look at was how well that worked as a standard procedure as opposed to essentially a litigation or a party-driven procedure like it is in Florida.  Both of them are played by evidentiary issues and timing issues and political issues but more and more states are choosing, at least, to take a look at some kind of post-election audit function as a way to address not just individual-raised questions but more systemic concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the process.</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  Just on that, recounts themselves are limited even under all systems.  We learned that in Florida where, if you will, the problems in that election were driven by ballot design flaws in Duval and Palm Beach County that accounted for most of the frustration in voter intentions not being reflected in accurate ballots so that some of the thrust of reform has appropriately been on other areas that would escape any kind of recount, namely ballot design.  So it is not clear to me and this is where I am sort of looking off of the technology, of whether off on the horizon --and maybe not too far away, maybe some technological help with this, something short of a paper trail that creates a record that can be used for recounts.  I think we ought to, at least, be open to that possibility.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  You have raised [indiscernible] the next question that I was going to ask because clearly ballot design is a major part of the problem, at least in the debacles we have had recently.  Do any of you know of efforts underway to provide some sort of safeguards so that you do not end up with these glaring ballot problems?  We know, at least, with the butterfly ballot that the ballot was out there for a while and before the election and the parties, for whatever reason, did not notice it, did not focus on it, did not see it as a problem. Which is kind of stunning when after the election you took one look at it and you thought how could anybody have designed this or how could anybody have vetted it.  Presumably, this ballot in Sarasota should have been vetted by people who now are sensitive to the issue but did not.  How does this process work and is there any other way of dealing with it? </P> <P>Zachary Goldfarb:  [Indiscernible] in here.  I am not sure about efforts to discuss ballot design but one thing I ll comment on is how this underscores the issue of partisanship in the administration of elections.  I know for a fact that in numerous states and counties, there are very vicious debates between Republican and Democratic elections commissioners over the design of the ballot because they believe that one design or the other will help their side.  I know in Indianapolis or Marion County, they have had a discussion over whether if you list it by office it will benefit the Democrats; if you list it by party, it will benefit the Republicans.  And so, this really underscores the issue of partisanship and the role it plays in the administration of elections.  It is not just how can an elections official be a partisan, favor one over the other but it really does have an effect on the actual experience of participating in the election.</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  And there are -- I think you put your finger on it - I think there are currently efforts to vet ballots.  The problem is they do not always work; people do not pay attention; there are not enough people who are looking at it and in many ways we test our ballots on Election Day and you can have evidence that they did not work.  There are efforts out there.  There is a group, the American Institute for Graphic Arts is doing some called Design for Democracy and it is very active and has worked with, I know, in Chicago and some other jurisdictions on their ballot and their election materials with an idea toward designing ballots and election materials so that they work the way people work.  That is very much in its infancy, though, and in many ways, and not to be a naysayer, but in many ways it frequently runs up against the requirements of state election law.  One of my favorite stories is Slate ran an article back during the gubernatorial recount in California, asking five separate graphic artists to take a look at the recall ballot and make it more useable for voters.  And almost every single one of them had some variation of let us not just emphasize the minor candidates.  Let us pick out the five major ones, put their name in bold and everybody else in.  And while that might work from a design standpoint, somewhere you can hear an election lawyer pulling out his or her hair.  </P> <P>So in many ways, we have to find a way to marry the latest thinking on design with the latest thinking on who is in charge at the state legislative level, to make election laws read, so that ballots read the way voters and poll workers read.  If that sounds like a daunting task, it is. But at least identifying it before the fact as opposed to after the fact as we did in places like Palm Beach County or Sarasota is at least a step in the right direction.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Just two more questions for you all.  We know that vote centers worked extraordinary well in Larimer County, Colorado and were a disaster in Denver because of problems with the polling books and the statewide voter registration basis.  We know that some states moved fairly smartly towards getting their statewide basis done and the others have stumbled along the way.  What is the state of play there?</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  On vote centers or on databases?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  It is all over the map, quite literally and figuratively.  You have got some states which are far enough along, that they are actually doing follow-on development.  I know Kansas, for example, is talking about integrating an election management system into its database so that it cannot only track cross-state voter registration but cross-state voter history.  Other states, Alabama, New York are still essentially at the starting line or maybe even sort of lacing up their cleats in terms of building their databases, that does as you point out have an impact on innovations like vote centers.  I think it is a clich� but it is apt in Denver.  One never plans for failure, one fails to plan.  And what happened in Denver on election day was essentially a decision to go to vote centers which had been popular in other Colorado jurisdictions without the follow-up planning and almost disaster torture testing on a database that needs to happen with the result that you had hundreds of thousands of people who had been promised a more convenient way to vote, standing in lines of three-plus hours, wondering what the hell was going on.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  And then finally for any of you as in so many areas, It is the money, stupid.   The ability to get much of these done depends on adequate sums of money.  Having lots of well-trained poll workers is made much easier if there is a lot of money to do so; having innovations out there, all of these depends on money.  Rush Holt s bill as you pointed out would allocate $300 million dollars for states.  </P> <P>We know that Congress is in a fiscal straitjacket right now, has an enormous number of competing priorities and election administration has never been at or near the top of the priority list.  One of the prospects for having some significant infusion of money so that even the EAC can operate at the level it is supposed to operate at, or that we can get some of these changes made in the states, and what can be done without money?</P> <P>Zachary Goldfarb:  Well, I think it would be a highly unlikely scenario that in the short-term that Congress would, given the [indiscernible] regulations that require them to find money or change tax law for anything they want to spend, that it is very unlikely that Congress is going to find $300 million dollars for this.  I mean this topic sort of falls into the good governance world of Congress, where they talk about the topics they really like to fund but do not get to doing it.  And I think the EAC even struggled in its first few months without office space.  I remember talking to Pastor Soaries who is the first chair of the EAC when they were having trouble finding office space and having enough staff, and I think that was the case in the beginning.  And EAC has helped the [indiscernible] the three to four billion that has already been distributed to the states, but I m not sure if there is much money is left except for studies and providing assistance but in a varied sort of information oriented way and not big grants to higher poll workers.  I think there is a million dollars for college workers recently.  But a million dollars over 50 states-- I think it was approximately million dollars.  Is that right?  I just do not see a lot of money coming from the federal government in the future on this topic, in the short-term at least, or in time for 2008 election.  </P> <P>Thomas Mann:  We will get it.  I also think that the politics here are such that I do not expect another infusion of federal dollars to the states.  It is a sort of partly a matter of the money is being spent and now there is all this controversy about the end to which it was put and the ends to which it was put.  Another thing is Rick s question.  Todd asked --it, it really does not help when NASS passes a resolution calling for the abolition of the EAC, which is the federal entity in this game.  But, these, we are talking before EAC, we are talking about small amounts of dollars making potentially a big difference especially in the R&D side of matters.  And it seems to me, skillful work on the part of a few individuals with some appropriation sub-committees could make a difference here.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  We are going to go to the audience and start back there and as always please identify yourself.</P> <P>Donetta Davidson:  Donetta Davidson and I m the Chair of the EAC, but I just wanted to add one statement to what Doug</P> <P>had to say on the design of the ballots.  We have been doing a study with the Institute on the design of the ballots, and they are going to do a presentation to us at our next public hearing which is April 8th in Kansas City.  So, we are excited about that.  It was also tested in Nebraska this last election.  So they used that as the pilot county or pilot state and so we are excited about that coming forth because the design of the ballots, we believe, is very important.  And besides just the design of the ballot is forms for the voters and everything because I think we all realized there is a big problem with a lot of the information that goes out to the voters.</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  Thanks Donetta.  What is the state of the play in the EAC resolution calling for the abolition of NASS?  Just kidding.</P> <P>Donetta Davidson:  Thanks, just a joke, huh?</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  Over here with Rick.  Wait hang on, Rick.</P> <P>Rick Hasen:  Thanks.  This is question for Tom and Zach.  I agree that congressional action on election reform is unlikely.  I am wondering if it has become even more unlikely as it has become embroiled or enmeshed in presidential politics.  So if you look at Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, both of whom have longstanding interests in election reform, the very fact that some of these are being offered by them and if passed, would give a victory to one or the other, has both interpartisan and intrapartisan consequences.  And I m wondering rather than legislation coming from Obama or Clinton or McCain, is there within Congress, from Senator Feinstein or elsewhere, any effort to go bipartisan on some of the basic things where there might be consensus?  For example, the bill that would bar Secretaries of State from serving as chairs of presidential campaigns?</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  You are absolutely right about the impact of the presidential campaign on the politics of election reform legislation in Congress.  It is without question.  Senator Feinstein initial speech, she has not yet introduced any legislation but her initial speech leads me to believe that as much as one might expect and hope for a kind of broad bill that would attract some bipartisan support, hers will be pretty close to others that have been there.  Now, on a more encouraging sign, the committee is actually beginning with a no brainer.  If Michael Malvin [phonetic] is still here, he will be pleased that for a requirement - the senate candidates as well as the rest of the world must file electronically.  Mind you, they will still get to send it to their own senate official but within 24 hours it will move to Allen s [indiscernible] and will be available almost instantaneously.  So that was encouraging because that has broad bipartisan support and we will see if someone puts a hold on it but that is an early sign of trying to do something that is consensual.  But in the election reform agenda, it just seems so connected to Democratic and Republican interests in the upcoming election that I am skeptical.</P> <P>Zachary Goldfarb:  I ll add briefly to that.  I was a little curious how Senator Clinton came out with her polls [indiscernible] in just recent days when I mean Feinstein is clearly rushing on this and there is already the Obama bill out there.  And conceptually, all these things are trying to achieve the same thing.  And so it seems to me that this legislation could have an important play within the Democratic party primaries and reaching out to certain constituencies.  The DNC has spent a lot of money in the last election to do election oversight and hire many lawyers.  And so I think that it could have important, sort of intra-party ramifications.  But I do not see Senator Clinton or Obama or whoever the nominee is, bringing this up on the campaign trail very often when there are these other issues that are really going to cloud out everything else.  So that is my take.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  So, let s go down here and then we will go over to the right.</P> <P>Chris Sheridan:  Chris Sheridan with the Committee of Seventy.  It seems to me like one of the great opportunities for controversy in 2008 is over the validity of provisional ballots as far as inner states still have varying standards of its casting norm in precinct.  In some places, it does not count at all.  Ryan, I m from Pennsylvania.  We count everything that you are eligible for.  It counts.  And obviously you might lose the state house race but your vote for president or governor is going to be valid.  Is there any prospect for resolving that issue as far as having national uniformity between the EAC, Congress or Litigation before 2008?</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  The short answer, I think, is no.  I think the only place you are going to get national uniformity is that of Congress.  And we will just reference the last 45 minutes as to the prospects of that.  I do think and I really do--I try to view glasses as half-full. I do think in many ways, as these databases get better, that the number of provisional ballots in theory should go down as voters have a better chance to know where they are supposed to vote, how they are supposed to vote, when they are supposed to vote.  At least in theory, the number of provisional ballots should go down.  We will see whether or not that actually is born out in practice, but if we are looking for any kind of either legislative, litigation or even policy-based solution to the problem, I do not see it in the foreseeable future.</P> <P>Roy Saltland [phonetic]:  Roy Saltland, author.  I have three small points.  First, there are technological ways now to assure redundancy, the word used by Vernon Ehlers and I use independent verification without paper and I m trying to have the Holt bill changed so that it would reflect a concept or a process rather than a specific technology.  Anybody who would like to help me on that, send me or give me your email address.  Two, the Keating and Company report done by many, many newspapers which Dan was one of the leaders is described in extension in the first chapter of my book.  Anybody who really wants the full story --and I have heard congressmen, as Vernon Ehlers did, over simplify the matter.  I have tried to do it in a non-partisan way, citing the facts rather than over simplifying, so look at chapter one of my book and you will find it there.  </P> <P>Third, the Design for Democracy group has done excellent work.  Marcia Lawson [phonetic], one of the primary persons, has written the book called Design for Democracy.  I hope to review it as it comes out for the Election Law Review in the next few months and I hope that they will be able to participate in.  Obviously, the human factor in the design of the ballots is a very essential component that has been left out.  The hard technologies have gotten their way and these softer but very essential requirements should be further looked at and improved.</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  At the back.</P> <P>Lenny Shambon [phonetic]:  Lenny Shambon.  Every so often you have to ask publicly a seemingly outrageous question.  We are dealing with close races, where at some point you are reaching an irreconcilable level of error, and we are trying to chase down solutions for reducing that zone but you cannot reduce it completely.  And for those kinds of races, you really are looking at whether you can get voter acceptance of the outcome of those very close races.  Has there ever been any political -- this is a sort of a question for the political scientists in the room.  Has there been studies or discussion of resolving such races by methods other than trying to count and find a one-vote margin.  For instance, coin flipping the outcome or term-sharing.  Now you are going to think that is fairly ridiculous except I tried this out on a Republican colleague of mine, Paul Bennewitz [phonetic], and he was not opposed to such an outcome because you are essentially dealing with a tie.  I am curious to know if the policy side community has ever thought about coin flipping these outcomes?</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  We actually had a vote on it, and it was very, very close.</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  I should point out that one of it - and this really does flag me as a geek - there are provisions in state law that vary as widely as the states.  You can have coin flips; in some of the Western states, you actually cut cards and the high cards wins.  I joked.</P> <P>Male Voice:  [Inaudible].</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  I just want to say, I said, I turn to these guys and I said, Pistols at dawn.   It is a concept.  I do think that the effort to drive error to zero is a worthy goal.  I think everyone agrees that it is probably more of a goal than an actual sort of mission statement.  I think as we learn more about the process, though, I think it is possible to drive that number down closer to zero.  My guess is that the politics in this country change; in other words, expanding the margin of victory sooner than we figure out how to drive that number down to a level such that our current 50/50 nature is resolvable on election night.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  There have been instances actually of term-sharing in state legislatures were they have at least leaders go back and forth.  One measure of this, if you look at the last dispute that Congress took up, that continues to reverberate with enormously harsh feelings, the Indiana 8th in 1985, those were optical scan ballots and Congress brought them in and had to make judgments about ballots where one question was whether the oval had been completely filled-in or only halfway filled-in or whether somebody filled-in the oval and then wrote the name in addition, whether those ballots get counted.  And there is no clear-cut answer there either so when the result came out, and it was very close of course, it was not widely accepted.  It is one reason why if some of the technology that is out there can eventually become more widely-used.  For example, the machine that ES&S has, that has a touch-screen, where the voter prints on to an optical scan ballot and you get presumably a perfect ballot and then you have got the hard ballots that you can count and recount.  But you are not going to have these disputes over undervotes, overvotes or writing elements or anything else in the same fashion.  You might reduce the chances of problems that result in harsh feelings, but you are always going to have instances, like in Florida, where you are below any reasonable margin of error and you are going to have errors.  Right here.</P> <P>Whit Airs [phonetic]:  I m Whit Airs.  How would you, folks, assess the integrity of the American electoral process compared to other advanced, industrialized democracies?</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  In Venezuela, for example?</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  I m trying to sort of the best I can grasp and summarize inadequate literature but I would say we re no better than middle and maybe middle-low.  I would point to the Australians, to the Canadians as being ahead of us.  I think a number of European countries have systems less prone to manipulation, either of access or integrity.  So, we like to blow our horns-- you know, toot our horns.  We think we are the greatest democracy in the world and we like to say it.  I think what we have discovered over time is we are a great country with a marvelous constitution and we have demonstrated time and again how imperfect our system is.  And that is why we are always working to try to make it better, but I think recent years and a range of areas, including election administration and redistricting and others have demonstrated that we have a lot to explain and we are not quite at the top of the pack as we oftentimes assume we are.</P> <P>Doug Chapin:    First of all, I think - I hate to be an exceptionalist. I think the Americans system is almost unique in the degree to which place is important.  We do not run nationalist elections.  We are not a parliamentary-- we literally are -- most candidates run from a patch of land and part of the problem is identifying which voters belong with that patch of land.  In that sense, I do think sometimes it is apples to oranges with some of these other countries.  That said, and it was put in mind by Norm s plug of the Mexico event, even the best-laid system does not work well or can be perceived as not working well when an election is close.  I think if you talk to many international students of elections, they would hold out Mexico as a model.  You have got a civil service, you got a special election court, A through Z, all sorts of things.  And yet because they have a presidential election that was decided by something like a hundredth of a percentage point, you have got roughly half of the Mexican electorate believing the result was stolen. </P> <P>So, in many ways voter confidence is driven by the result less than by the process.  And so, I think it is important that while we need to learn from other countries, we need not either export our system blindly nor import it from others the same way.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  The one larger point that has been made but needs to be reiterated, it is very hard to find another system where partisan officials run elections and the problem goes beyond somebody cheering a presidential campaign.  We had an Iowa and Ohio this last election.  The candidates for governor in the states were responsible for running the elections in which they were the candidates themselves.  It is frankly bizarre.</P> <P>Female voice:  [Indiscernible] Vote Trust USA.  I have a quick for Doug.  You mentioned in your opening remarks that there was paper ballot legislation.  Could you please elaborate on that and its prospects?</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  My understanding -- and I meant to get started and get out of my depth, I believe there is a - is it the Nelson Bill that is believed to be more focused on paper ballots than papers trails?  That is the way it is being -- you can shake your head.  That is the way it is certainly from sitting where we sit. That is, at least, the way in many ways it is being presented.  Is it something that every sector of the community would agree is the right kind of bill?  I am willing to fudge a little bit on whether or not that bill is representative of that point of view, but I stand by the fact that the community is no longer solidly behind the kind of paper trails that are presented in the whole legislation.  To my knowledge, without having gone through every bill, my understanding is that there is sentiment [indiscernible], it is whether or not something has been introduced, I do not know, but that there is a sentiment for a specific paper ballot legislation out there.  Whether or not it has been specifically introduced, I ll plead ignorance at this point.</P> <P>Monie [phonetic]:  Monie from Fair Vote, a nonpartisan election reform group in Maryland.  I would like to get the panel's views on reforming the Electoral College with the goal of ensuring that it is always the winner of the national popular vote that gets elected as president, and especially given the fact that in the last two election cycles, the result has been very close.  And take for example 2004 when, if Kerry had just won Ohio, he would have gotten the presidency despite the fact that Bush won by 3 million votes.  So I would like to get your views on reforming the Electoral College.</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  I guest I will dive in again and actually, I hope he is still hear.  I am going to paraphrase a friend and a colleague and even a mentor, Dick Smolka [phonetic], who said -he is apparently in the back, - who said, That for years , he said, that the next time that winner of the popular vote did not win the Electoral College, he expected that there to be an immediate move to reform the Electoral College.  It happened in 2000 and the reform did not happen.  It is a very tricky business.  I think that we will continue to see interest in reforming the Electoral College.  Again, and to the extent it needs to come out of Congress, now referenced to the last hour of this discussion, but also individual states, I think, worry about their place in the process.  That is the sort of thing that I think that will be debated.  Absent any sort of major shock to the system, again, it is not something that I would bet on happening in the foreseeable future.</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  It turns out if your scenario had happened, Kerry winning Ohio and losing the popular vote by a couple of million, you might have had the ingredients to bring together parties on behalf of a reform effort because each would have been damaged in successive elections.  That did not happen, therefore, Doug is right; there is a little chance.  And I think the creative effort of Fair Vote and others on the state compact idea is one that has some problems.  And as you are discovering and I do not think it offers any immediate way out of the serious political obstacles.  I am more sympathetic now than I was as a young political scientist.  I saw all the various virtues in the Electoral College that begin to elude me as I get older.</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  But again many things begin to elude as we get old.</P> <P>Doug Chapin:  Very quickly though,  I do want to point out hearing Fair Vote.  Fair Vote has also been very involved in the concept of instant run-off or rank choice voting and I do want to point out that while that has been -- that it has encountered resistance in some quarters, it is now, in many ways, sweeping the nation with regard to overseas voters who do not always have able to get their ballots back and forth.  So again, having shown you the hole on the doughnut, let me show you the doughnut, that even ideas that were considered somewhat farfetched and out-of-the-mainstream are now starting to take hold at least in small areas.  And so maybe that same kind of change is possible through the compact idea or something else.  So the things that sounded beyond [inaudible] even, say, a decade ago are now increasingly of interest to state and local election officials. And that kind of change is the sort of thing that many advocates and practitioners are banking on across the country.</P> <P>Norman Ornstein:  I have one last question here or actually we will take two.</P> <P>Gary Mitchell [phonetic]:  Thanks.  Gary Mitchell from the Mitchell Report and this is a quick question and arguably not much of one but I will do it anyway and that is, whenever I listen to these conversations I keep saying, so how do we get here?  Was it always this way or do we just know more about it? And I was thinking about Doug s earlier comment about Britney Spears and the sort of Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith thing.  I am struck by a parallel, and I just do not know whether you are, and that is, my particular interest in this subject is the extent to which this phenomenon of close elections parity et cetera is putting, as I think Tom said, democracy at risk or something on that order.  </P> <P>And I guess my question is, to what extent is this phenomenon not unlike the Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith phenomenon which is we got too many media outlets, cable television in particular, chasing too little news making  which they need to do and that sort of constant drumbeat that comes from that kind of coverage?  To what extent does that sort of get at the democracy-at-risk notion and take us away from the possibility that what we really need to do is flip a coin and get on with it?</P> <P>Thomas Mann:  Well, that is question that a lot of people think about.  We obviously tolerate more air:  A) When we do not know about it and B) when the stakes are lower.  So there is no question but that it was the dramatic results of the Florida 2000 and overall 2000 presidential elections that turned into a set of issues, something that had not been around, even though the underlying administration of elections had not worsened, in fact, if anything, we probably were moving incrementally to make things better over a period of time.  Now having said that, does that mean this is a creature of media excesses?  No.  There is something real.  </P> <P>We discovered many, many imperfections in our system we did not know about.  Not just imperfections but sort of gross problems that we were not prepared to live with once we knew about them.  And it is perfectly reasonable therefore that we try to attend to these.  If anything, though, if the media plays a role, it is in the sort of the - sometimes the breathless quality and a sort of lack of immediate perspective on what the nature of the problem is and how serious it is.  But this would be with us in any case.  We have entered a new world and, yes, we ought to get away from imperfection but we are going to demand higher standards and higher performance.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Well, let me take this occasion to make an announcement.  I might be the father of Anna Nicole Smith s baby.  And one last question, right here.</P> <P>Female Voice:  Zach, please.  You have mentioned that on one hand, the media is sick about reporting on this issue.  But on the other hand, for progress to be made on election reform, we need to have informed citizens and legislatures.  How can we reconcile these differences?</P> <P>Zachary Goldfarb:  I think you have the problem of -- you have a constant sort of change [indiscernible] in terms of practical perspective.  You have a constant change in who is covering [indiscernible] newspapers and magazines and media.  And sort of to contrast it with a point that was just made, as most election reform advocates here probably know and are frustrated by, it is probably very hard to convince newspaper reporters and others to actually go ahead with new studies.  And the reason for that is because newspapers and magazines and media are always focused on sort of what is new and what is happening now and how is this different from before and where is the evidence.  And we tend to be a little bit dense about the sort of potential for problems.  I think the way you communicate - I do not know exactly; I do not have any honest answer, of exactly how one better creates a synergy between raising concern early enough so that by the time we pay attention to it, it is not too late.  </P> <P>And I think there were a lot issues with the media.  It is hard to achieve that early in before there is actually - media is often very responsive to crisis once they occur and not beforehand.  But if there is any advice, I would say to stick to specific incidences of discoveries or things that are changing and point to us concrete examples as you can, that offers something at least different from what was discussed in the last election or provide context about how this changed because as the first ones in the first panel said, I think, the Indiana Secretary of State said, newspapers do not have, for the most part, someone dedicated to this topic and media generally and so they need to be sort of better educated about how is this, what is happening now differ from what was happening four months ago and how does it figure in to what is being discussed in Congress or in states?  We need to be given better perspective, I think, sometimes on how are things fit together.  I know that is an abstract answer and the fact is the media is just very responsive to issues rather than sort of getting ahead of them.  Most Americans do not have any idea about most of this stuff.  And so we are someplace in the middle, between the advocates and the people who study this on a daily basis and the general public who has no picture basically about most of these issues.  And so, it is just a constant dialog.  I do not think there is an easy answer for how it has improved or how [indiscernible] will come out by this point.</P> <P>Norman J. Ornstein:  Okay, thank you all very much for coming.  Let me also thank Molly Reynolds, Matt Weil and Tim Ryan for all that they did to help put this together and we will welcome you to our next events.  Thank you.</P> <P>[End of transcript]</P> <P> </P></body></html>