The past two presidential contests produced a sharp focus on the overall conduct of our elections. The picture is not encouraging. The process of actually casting a vote is one that varies widely around the country. Simple paper ballots with a marking stamp,punch card ballots marked with a stylus, and voting machines that can range from optically scanned paper ballots to seemingly
sophisticated touch screen electronic voting machines are all in use today.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was to address the problems arising out of Florida 2000 and thus restore the confidence of Americans in the election process. Instead the act created a revenue opportunity for the three main voting machine companies: Diebold, ESS, and Sequoia.

In areas with electronic voting, the process of recording and totaling votes is not visible to election officials or the public. Once votes are entered into private company voting or tabulating machines, they disappear forever from public review. We are no longer able to verify the basis for elections since we lack the ability to review the process due to vendor "proprietary" requirements. American elections have been outsourced to electronic voting machine companies.

The three major vendors all maintain that their code is a trade secret and thus cannot be reviewed by county and state election officials or external auditors. Yet Diebold opened its source code software to banks for their widely used ATM cash machine. Their customers, the banks, believe that handling money is too important to leave to in the hands of a vendor. The same argument applies to the votes of citizens. Access to and review of equipment, programming, and computer source code are critical to the enterprise of democracy.

Congress must protect the integrity of our elections by requiring voter verified paper ballots, instituting mandatory random hand counted audits to verify the accuracy of electronic tallies, and prohibiting the use of secret software and wireless communication devices in voting machines. We must take every step necessary to ensure reliable, secure, and transparent elections.