Update 9/18: Apparently the title for this post is still apt. This legislation made it onto the calendar for House consideration earlier this week, but it looks like, once again, it has been pulled. We don’t expect to see action this week. The delay apparently still revolves around claims of whether the legislation unduly burdens state and local jurisdictions.

Original Post 9/10: When I started writing this post last week, the House of Representatives had finally scheduled Representative Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) e-voting reform legislation – the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 811) for consideration. However, lingering concerns voiced by state and local officials and disability groups appear to have stalled the legislation’s consideration yet again. This latest delay is after the bill’s author made concessions – including more flexible deadlines, additional reviews of technology to determine accessibility and proposed additional federal funding - to address these concerns.

This legislation proposes a comprehensive overhaul of the U.S. voting system. It requires voter verified paper ballots for all machines, requires random manual audits of those ballots, reforms the testing and certification system for voting machines and requires the disclosure of the software used by voting machines. We’ve posted some previous analysis here (1, 2), and Representative Holt’s website has a nice summary of the updated key provisions.

The major groups opposed to the legislation fall into two general camps. Disability groups have expressed concern that mandating voter-verified paper ballot undermines accessibility. (As a supporter of independent voter verification, we’ve argued existing technologies can address this and that paper ballots improve accessibility for some groups.) State and local officials have expressed concern that replacing existing technologies, coupled with the legislation’s auditing requirements will be too costly to implement and tread on their authority to administer elections.

To bring the legislation to the floor, its champions had made some concessions to address these issues. First, they pushed back the dates for when voting technologies must produce accessible, readable and durable paper ballots. While the legislation would require that all machines produce some sort of paper ballot by the 2008 election, the durability and readability requirements wouldn’t apply until the 2012 election. This means the current, and terribly flawed, “reel-to-reel” paper printers on many direct electronic recording machines (DREs) could continue to be used. Second, they added an accessibility review provision that requires the Election Assistance Commission to inventory and assess how accessible voting technologies are. Third, they authorized addition federal funding to cover the costs of implementing the legislation.

These concessions do not appear to be enough as Congressional Leadership pulled the bill from the House schedule when it stalled in the obscure but powerful House Rules Committee. (This committee is charged with bringing legislation before the House.) The House has a short work week this week, and it looks like, unless something really unexpected happened, the earliest we could see action would be next week. Stay tuned for updates.

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