Honest Voting

The Election Assistance Commission faces nearly impossible odds. Established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, this independent, bipartisan commission (two Republicans, two Democrats) was given the job of creating and improving election standards for all 50 states. But Congress forgot to give it any funding. At first the four commissioners had to meet in a Starbucks.

Since then Congress has ponied up some operating cash, at first $700,000, now $16.5 million. (In a June 15 story by Deborah Hastings of the Associated Press about the EAC, the agency’s current operating budget was erroneously reported at $115 million. The larger figure actually represents money appropriated by Congress for election reform projects in the states.)

The commission isn’t entirely toothless. In January 2007 the commission banned Ciber, Inc. from testing voting machines until it got its quality assurance procedures up to snuff. (Also, Ciber contributes to election campaigns, mostly to Republicans. Nope, no conflict of interest there!) The commission dinged but did not decertify SysTest Labs, another machine certification company, pointing out that it just made electronic voting look bad if a voting machine certifier accepted work from a winning political candidate whose election had been challenged because of possible voting machine irregularities.

But the EAC is, at best, forced to do too much with too little.  At worst there’s the possibility that the commission was designed to be brought out at parties and congressional inquiries so that the administration could say, “But we’re working on the problem, honest!” Either way the result has been weak standards, poorly enforced.

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