From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger@xxxxxxx>
Date: June 11, 2004 5:05:23 PM PDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, Dewayne Hendricks
<dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: NY Times: The Disability Lobby and Voting (Diebold donations
get Disability groups to support paperless voting)
The Disability Lobby and Voting
June 11, 2004
MAKING VOTES COUNT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11FRI1.html
Two obvious requirements for a fair election are that voters should
have
complete confidence about their ballots' being counted accurately and
that
everyone, including the disabled, should have access to the polls. It
is
hard to imagine advocates for those two goals fighting, but lately that
seems to be what's happening.
The issue is whether electronic voting machines should provide a "paper
trail" — receipts that could be checked by voters and used in recounts.
There has been a rising demand around the country for this critical
safeguard, but the move to provide paper trails is being fought by a
handful
of influential advocates for the disabled, who complain that requiring
verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible
electronic
voting machines.
The National Federation of the Blind, for instance, has been
championing
controversial voting machines that do not provide a paper trail. It has
attested not only to the machines' accessibility, but also to their
security
and accuracy — neither of which is within the federation's areas of
expertise. What's even more troubling is that the group has accepted a
$1
million gift for a new training institute from Diebold, the machines'
manufacturer, which put the testimonial on its Web site. The federation
stands by its "complete confidence" in Diebold even though several
recent
studies have raised serious doubts about the company, and California
has
banned more than 14,000 Diebold machines from being used this November
because of doubts about their reliability.
Disability-rights groups have had an outsized influence on the debate
despite their general lack of background on security issues. The
League of
Women Voters has been a leading opponent of voter-verifiable paper
trails,
in part because it has accepted the disability groups' arguments.
Last year, the American Association of People With Disabilities gave
its
Justice for All award to Senator Christopher Dodd, an author of the
Help
America Vote Act, a post-2000 election reform law. Mr. Dodd, who has
actively opposed paper trails, then appointed Jim Dickson, an
association
official, to the Board of Advisors of the Election Assistance
Commission,
where he will be in a good position to oppose paper trails at the
federal
level. In California, a group of disabled voters recently sued to undo
the
secretary of state's order decertifying the electronic voting machines
that
his office had found to be unreliable.
Some supporters of voter-verifiable paper trails question whether
disability-rights groups have gotten too close to voting machine
manufacturers. Besides the donation by Diebold to the National
Federation of
the Blind, there have been other gifts. According to Mr. Dickson, the
American Association of People with Disabilities has received $26,000
from
voting machine companies this year.
The real issue, though, is that disability-rights groups have been
clouding
the voting machine debate by suggesting that the nation must choose
between
accessible voting and verifiable voting.
It is well within the realm of technology to produce machines that
meet both
needs. Meanwhile, it would be a grave mistake for election officials
to rush
to spend millions of dollars on paperless electronic voting machines
that
may quickly become obsolete.
Disabled people have historically faced great obstacles at the polls,
and
disability-rights groups are right to work zealously for accessible
voting.
But they should not overlook the fact that the disabled, like all
Americans,
also have an interest in ensuring that their elections are not stolen.