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35–805 2007

ELECTION REFORM: MACHINES AND SOFTWARE 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS 

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE 

ADMINISTRATION 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

MEETING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 15, 2007 

Printed for the use of the Committee on House Administration 

( 

Available on the Internet: 

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/house/administration/index.html 


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COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION 

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD, California, Chairwoman 

ROBERT A. BRADY, Pennsylvania 

ZOE LOFGREN, California 

MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts 

CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas 

SUSAN DAVIS, California 

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan 

Ranking Minority Member 

DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California 

KEVIN MCCARTHY, California 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS

ZOE LOFGREN, California, Chairwoman 

JUANITA MILLENDER-MCDONALD, 

California 

CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas 

SUSAN DAVIS, California 

KEVIN MCCARTHY, California 

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan 


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ELECTION REFORM: MACHINES AND 

SOFTWARE 

Thursday, March 15, 2007 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, 

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION, 

Washington, D.C. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:25 p.m., in room 

1539, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Zoe Lofgren (chairwoman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Present: Representatives Lofgren, Millender-McDonald, Davis of 

California and McCarthy. 

Staff Present: Tom Hicks, Counsel; Janelle Hu, Professional Staff 

Member; Matt Pinkus, Professional Staff/Parliamentarian; Kristin 

McCowan, Chief Legislative Clerk; Gineen Beach, Minority Counsel; Peter Sloan, Minority Professional Staff; Salley Collins, Minority Press Secretary; and Fred Hay, Minority General Counsel. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Welcome to the first Subcommittee on Elections 

and Election Reform. I am honored to be serving as Chair of this 

subcommittee, and I look forward to working with our Ranking 

Member Mr. McCarthy, my colleague from California, as well as 

the rest of the committee as we look at our election systems and 

make sure that we have the best that we possibly can in our country. 

The purpose of this hearing is to begin to look at election reform, 

specifically the tools of voting machines, software, and making 

these tools accessible to all. In accordance with the rules of this 

committee, witnesses will have 5 minutes for their testimony and 

may submit written testimony, and any Members wishing to submit opening remarks for the record may do so, although, of course, 

the Ranking Member is welcome to make an opening statement. 

[The statement of Ms. Lofgren follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Our apologies to everyone here. The House has 

had an open vote for a considerable period of time while the President was here, and it has really gotten our schedule out of whack. 

So if it is possible for witnesses to make their summary even less 

long, 3 minutes, that would be a good idea, because we do have another panel, and I can assure you we will read your entire written 

testimony. That would be very helpful in making sure that everyone gets heard. 

We are debating to replace outdated punch-card systems with 

more advanced machines. Unfortunately, the Nation still has not 

fixed the machinery of voting. All systems need better testing, 

maintenance, and independent certification. All certifications need 

to be audited, and besides being audited, these systems and software used in them must be open. 

When programs can redistribute and modify the source code, the 

piece of software that is involved can be improved and adapted. 

Numerous reports are calling on the Judiciary Committee for this. 

The secretary of state of California, and academics call for greater 

accountability on voting machines and software, and we know that 

as we do this, we need to make sure that our fellow Americans who 

have disabilities are accommodated fully as they also join us in voting at the polls. We cannot ignore those with disabilities, and clearly we have no intention of doing so. 

I am excited to have these two panels before us, and now I would 

like to recognize my colleague from California, the Ranking Member Mr. McCarthy. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Well, I want to thank the Chair for having this 

hearing. I think this is something we should do always; not wait 

until we believe there is a problem out there with elections, but we 

should always analyze them, look at what we are using, and continue to have America having one of the most honest elections 

throughout this world. 

But in light of time, I will submit my remarks and leave more 

time to listen to you so we can have some questions. 

Thank you. 

[The statement of Mr. McCarthy follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. And we have been joined by another Californian, 

my colleague Susan Davis. 

Ms. LOFGREN. So we will begin with our witnesses, and if we can 

start with Mr. Pierce and move right along the panel. Welcome. 

STATEMENTS OF KELLY PIERCE, DISABILITY SPECIALIST, 

COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS, STATE’S ATTORNEY OFFICE; ERIC 

CLARK, SECRETARY OF STATE, STATE OF MISSISSIPPI; 

DIANE CORDRY GOLDEN, Ph.D., DIRECTOR, MISSOURI ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY; AND TED SELKER, Ph.D., DIRECTOR, 

VOTING TECHNOLOGY PROJECT, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

STATEMENT OF KELLY PIERCE 

Mr. PIERCE. Thank you, and if you could, Madam Chairwoman, 

warn me about a minute before my time is up. 

I am coming here as a disability specialist at the Cook County 

State’s Attorney’s Office and a member of the accessibility committees of the Cook County Clerk’s Office and the Chicago Board of 

Election Commissioners. 

I have worked extensively on disability-related technology issues 

since the early 1990s. I have worked specifically on systems regarding audio systems, regarding automatic teller machines for large financial systems, including J.P. Morgan-Chase, LaSalle Bank, and 

American Express, and most recently on developing the voting system that Chicago and Cook County implemented starting last year. 

I became blind in 1985, and for the past two decades, I have used 

someone to vote for me except for last year. During those two decades, I endured different kinds of experiences, often humiliating 

and degrading, poll workers who seemed illiterate, who could barely read the ballot or had to spell candidates’ names to me. Some 

poll workers had difficulty even seeing the ballot. Other times it 

was friends who would reveal my votes to other people that I 

turned out to be somewhat embarrassed about or humiliated about. 

And once I had a confrontation in the voting booth where someone 

challenged my candidate’s choice, the choice of the candidate I 

wanted to vote for. Eventually they punched a hole in the ballot 

card, and I trusted that they punched the candidate that I wanted 

to select. 

What I would like to share with the committee is our experience 

working with Sequoia Voting Systems. We selected a machine, the 

only verified paper ballot machine at the time in 1985 when we 

worked with Sequoia spending considerable resources, and they 

spent considerable resources. The disability resources elected officials, including Cook County organizations, spent considerable 

time, resources, and energy working together, as well as Sequoia, 

including the company president, meeting with disability leaders 

several times, and it resulted in significant advantages. 

That access was quite substantial and significant. Dozens of 

changes were made. Two control boxes were produced during that 

time period, one for the primary election and one for the most recent general election. 

So I guess my time is up, and I have submitted my written testimony. 


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Ms. LOFGREN. We thank you very much. 

[The statement of Mr. Pierce follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Next I would like to ask Dr. Selker from the Voting Technology Project at MIT to share his thoughts with us. 

STATEMENT OF TED SELKER 

Mr. SELKER. Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, thank you 

so much for having me. 

I have been working on voting technology since the 2000 election 

problems, and the goal of producing lost votes universally requires 

us to make selection accessibility, and you have to think about how 

the process has gone. It has always been that people are going back 

and forth between ballotless and balloted. Voting with ballotless, 

you are using a systematic control of some sort, some mechanism 

to check for problems, and with ballots you are using humans to 

control for problems. 

To the extent that we have humans in the process, which we 

very much do, we have to have performance-based approaches to 

test the quality of every step of the process. And I think that during the ballot counting and recording, we are always in danger of 

losing ballots. And today 1 in 30 selections on every commercial 

system that I have tested is for the candidate next to the one you 

meant to vote for. It is worse if you have reading disabilities, and 

it is easy to make improvements with that. We have done it in the 

laboratory with systems that make them more readable, and you 

have better feedback and more redundancy. 

The second chance approaches that we all are working towards 

with the Help America Vote Act include using VPACs, and what 

we have discovered in testing various approaches, that if you have 

people with optical scans try to verify, they don’t find problems. If 

you have them with VPACs, they have 106 ballots with errors no 

one reported. You get a lot more with the audio. You get another 

almost six times more people reporting. Not everybody catches the 

problem, but people get more. 

The thing we want to take care of is not to be adding to the problems we have. There are improvements that can be made to paper 

trails if we work towards it. But basically I guess what I really 

want to make sure that we are focusing on is that in the end, we 

are making sure that any record that we use is reliable enough to 

improve voting; 1 in 500,000 may be a good number for how often 

you don’t want the equipment of the machines to stop you from voting. 

What should be the best evidence if you have a problem? If you 

have two records, it should be that we know to look for the one that 

we are sure is good evidence and we can figure it out at the time. 

My time is up. 

Ms. LOFGREN. We appreciate that. We have your testimony. 

[The statement of Mr. Selker follows:] 


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U.S. HOUSE ADMINISTRATION SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS HEARING ON

ACCESSIBILITY AND USABILITY—MARCH 15, 2007, 2 P.M. 

TED SELKER, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, MIT MEDIA LAB, MIT DIRECTOR, CALTECH/MIT 

VOTING TECHNOLOGY PROJECT

Thank you for the honor of inviting me to give testimony to the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, hearing on accessibility and usability. I want to 

thank the members of the committee for allowing me to testify. 

I’m Ted Selker, Associate Professor of the MIT Media Lab, and co-director of the 

Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. I invite you to email me follow-up questions 

at Selker@Media.MIT.edu. I’ll be talking about reducing lost votes universally. As 

we are trying to improve elections, we must use universal design to make selection 

accessibility possible for all voters. The process must be accurate. Systems have 

been developed which use ballots and have physical records which rely on human 

control. More recently, approaches have been developed with systematic ways of 

counting ballots with computers, or with mechanical systems. These systems, such 

as lever systems and electronic voting machines, depend on systematic mechanisms 

for testing the votes, and human control as back up. The process of reducing lost 

votes universally requires humans to use performance based approaches to test all 

parts of the vote. Secondary records might improve auditability but only if they are 

independently verified to be accurate and reliable. 

Selection accessibility is the central problem for everyone, and especially for people with reading disabilities. All technologies that are used today lose votes. Typically with paper ballots and with electronic ballots, we see one mistake in thirty 

selections in which a voter selects the adjacent person, choosing a candidate that 

they did not mean to vote for. It is very easy to reduce these mistakes. We have 

made ballot designs and mechanisms that can reduce the errors of these sorts by 

fifty percent to eighty percent. 

Elizabeth Rosenswieg, Anna Pandolfo and I created experiments which have compared voter verified paper trails, contemporaneous paper trails, optical scan voting, 

and audio verification. These experiments found that it is very difficult for people 

to notice mistakes. In experiments with over 30 voters, no one found an error. The 

voters who had a paper trail found their errors 30 percent of the time. With contemporaneous paper trails, 40 percent of people found their errors. However, they had 

15 percent more errors than any other group. The act of having to pay attention 

to two things, the paper being printed out, and the electronic voting experiments, 

distracted them enough that they made extra errors. When using audio verification, 

50 percent of the people found errors. In earlier experiments in Sharon Cohen’s 

work, the audio found six times as many errors as the voter verified paper trail. 

We are not saying that verification records that are produced with audio or paper 

are the only way to have second chance voting. Certainly the review panes can be 

an excellent possibility for getting people to do second chance voting as well. However, these have to be designed in a way that helps guide a person to notice when 

they have under voted. 

In sightless voting we are especially concerned about selection accessibility. The 

audio ballot designs of today takes a sightless voter tens of minutes to complete. 

This has to be improved. The goal is access for people who have disabilities, not assistance. Up to 15 percent of the American public is reading disabled. Alignment 

improvements, simple layout, audio feedback, can all improve voting. The sight disabled can be helped with large ballots, large icons, words and buttons. High contrast 

and audio redundancy also helps them. People with other cognitive disabilities such 

as short-term memory problems, are helped by memory aids and audio feedback. 

In addition, performance based election administration qualification is central to 

keeping votes from being lost. We cannot know that we’ve trained election administration personnel until they demonstrate that they can do the job. At every step in 

the process, we must have people that know how to independently corroborate each 

other’s work in ballot counting, and reporting of the votes so that there is no change 

in the votes made by anybody but the voter. 

Serious research has been done in all of these areas. We have made the low error 

voting interface for helping people with reading disabilities and with sight disabilities. It uses redundancy with tabs that allow a person to see all of the races and 

the status of all the races simultaneously, as sort of a review pane that is always 

on the page. It uses large changes in the contrasting coloring of the race to show 

that it has been made. It shows one race per pane, and it uses the idea of simple 

layout, redundant feedback, and collaborating information as principles. We’ve also 

worked on audio which replaces beeps with words to give redundant confirmation 

and reduce voting time. To aid unbiased selection, the sex of the audio speaker 


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should match the sex of the candidate that is being selected. Essentially, to improve 

ballots, the research has to be continued. 

All forms of ballots must be evaluated before they are used. For example, we evaluated the ballot style used in Sarasota, Florida in 2006, and found that where there 

is an orphaned race on the same pane as another race, the residual rates increase 

substantially. In Charlotte County, Florida, the Attorney General race at the top of 

the ballot had a 22 percent under vote. And other races which are adjacent to it 

had less than 11⁄2 percent under vote. 

The goal is to focus on making legislation based on demonstrated systems that 

helps the system work. Can we make verification records that help even blind and 

disabled people improve their voting? So far the paper records have not demonstrated themselves to improve voting through verification, and in fact it appears 

that where they’ve been used, there is somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of them 

that are actually unreadable. Election process must strive to allow everyone to cast 

their intentions without mistakes. 

Things can be improved, and we must use this research. Legislation should not 

determine ahead of time that paper is the official record. To keep a record from 

being a target of fraud one should decide which available evidence is valid for what 

purposes after they’ve been created, not before. 

Records must be reliable, and whatever records we make must be able to comply 

with 2002 voting standards of one in 500,000 errors. We should not make legislation 

for technologies that have not been tested. We must specify systems that will improve reliability before we ask people to buy new systems. Purchasing equipment 

that is not tested wastes money in a time when we could be improving our elections 

to be a model for the world. I encourage you to consider the Policy piece from June 

2005 Science Magazine I submitted, and I encourage you to view more information 

at www.votingtechnologyproject.org. Thank you for your time, and I submit my testimony to the official record. 


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Ms. LOFGREN. We are honored to have the secretary of state of 

Mississippi Mr. Clark come all the way up here and give us the 

benefit of his experience and wisdom. 

STATEMENT OF ERIC CLARK 

Mr. CLARK. I am delighted to be here. I appreciate having the opportunity to be here. 

There are five points I want to try to make very quickly, and I 

think I can do it in 3 minutes. I am here as secretary of state of 

Mississippi and also as cochair of the Elections Committee of the 

National Association of Secretaries of State. 

First as to the disability issues. Two years ago, I appointed a 

task force in our State to pick a State voting machine, and we 

wound up with 77 out of our 82 counties taking that machine, and 

counties could either opt in or opt out. Citizens with disabilities 

were very active in that task force and had an extremely important 

influence in helping us pick the machine. We picked a touch-screen, 

and they were among the most vocal supporters of it, and people 

have told me for the first time they are able to vote a secret ballot. 

Like a person who is not able to see, there is an audio feature that 

walks that person through the ballot. It is extremely successful. 

I will tell you that not only the disability community, but generally, the machines are very, very popular in my State. It is more 

than a 98 percent approval rating in the surveys we have done. So 

we are in good shape there. 

I would ask you this: Please don’t break something that is working; but if you do, please, please, please give the States enough 

money to fix it. Now, where we are is the only bill I have seen introduced talks about $300 million. That won’t begin to do what 

that bill would mandate on the States. And I say that within the 

context that HAVA was underfunded to $800 million. So please 

don’t make us do something we can’t afford to do. 

If I may touch on three other issues. 

We have a paper trail in Mississippi. We bought a printer for 

every one of our DRE machines that is State involved. They work 

very well. They use thermal paper. It has a life of at least 5 years. 

The main—H.R. 81, that is the bill that I read, would make us do 

away with that. I think that it would be completely unnecessary, 

and I think it would be a complete waste of a lot of folks’ time and 

money. It says a paper trail has to be on durable paper of archival 

quality capable of withstanding multiple counts and recounts, without compromising the fundamental integrity of the ballots. If you 

take out the word ‘‘durable,’’ because I don’t know what a court 

would say that means, and if you take out ‘‘of archival quality,’’ our 

paper trail right now meets that test. 

The second point, it says the auditor has to do recounts. Please 

don’t give that function to somebody that knows nothing about elections, somebody who would simply complicate the process and 

make it impossible for us to certify the elections timely. My auditor 

is very much against it, and there is a letter from the National 

State Auditors Association saying that is a bad idea. Please give 

the folks with the responsible authority the opportunity to do their 

job. 


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And the fifth point is please don’t make us do that this year. 

That is what the bill says. We have 4 years to implement HAVA. 

There is no way under the sun we can make the kind of changes 

that are contemplated in that bill by next year’s elections. 

I have gone 12 seconds over. Bless your heart. Thank you for listening to me. 

[The statement of Mr. Clark follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. I will ask unanimous consent to put the letter into 

the record. 

[The information follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. And we also have a letter from a number of disability activists that I will also ask unanimous consent to put in 

the record before we call on our next witness. 

[The information follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Our next witness is Diane Golden. 

Dr. Golden, thank you so much for being here. 

STATEMENT OF DIANE CORDRY GOLDEN 

Ms. GOLDEN. Thank you. I am so impressed with how quickly 

somebody from Mississippi talks, because I talk really slowly, and 

I thought that is okay. Somebody before me is going to talk slowly. 

That isn’t the case. I will quickly try to summarize my comments. 

Thank you for inviting me to testify. I am very pleased to be 

here. First off, I am not here to oppose or endorse any voting system. I am here to talk solely about accessibility, which is what I 

know, love, and have done for the last 30 years. 

Accessibility in voting systems is no different from accessibility 

to computers or telephones or any other types of equipment that 

you provide accessibility to people with disabilities. It means you 

have a set of access standards, and the equipment or the device 

conforms to those standards. That is how you judge whether or not 

something is accessible. If indeed the decision is made that one or 

more of the determinative votes of records needs to be paper, then 

that paper needs to be accessible, period. There is just no two ways 

around it. It is not going to work to have an accessible electronic 

vote record or ballot and an inaccessible paper one. You just see 

the problem with that. It is clearly lack of equal access. 

So the good news is we have, I think, a very good set of access 

standards in the voluntary voting system standards that the EAC 

adopted. They are fairly robust. They could be improved, but they 

provide a wide range of access features for people who are blind, 

people who have low vision, people with motor limitations, et 

cetera. So it is a cross-disability way of delivering access. 

The down side is that when you add paper into that process, we 

currently don’t have equipment on the market readily available 

that delivers all of those access features when a paper ballot is involved. 

And I will tell you just very quickly the two major access problems we have. The DRE systems that are on the market with the 

VVPAT attached, as Mississippi is using, the problem with accessing those systems is that the print on the paper is not accessible. 

That print is going to have to be converted into an accessible form 

for people with disabilities to actually be able to verify the paper. 

Currently what they are verifying is the electronic ballot. 

The second equipment on the market are ballot-marking devices 

where the vote starts and ends paper, but there is an electronic 

interface that lets the person with the disability use large print, 

audio, switches so that they don’t have to touch or handle anything. Those systems are fully accessible except for the fact that 

you have this paper ballot that has to be sucked in, pulled out and 

physically manipulated, and for someone who is a quadriplegic, 

who has no use of their hands, it is impossible. So again, you have 

lost independent voting ability. 

So those are the two major access barriers we have when you reintroduce or mandate paper in the process. Are those two issues insurmountable technologically? No. They certainly can be addressed 

and resolved. What will it take? Time and money. And I will echo 

the secretary of state’s statement: It is going to take us time and 


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money, but it can be done, and if that is what needs to be done 

to make voting secure, so be it. We just need to make it accessible 

at the same time. 

Thank you. 

[The statement of Ms. Golden follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much to all of you. 

We have been joined by the Chairwoman of the full committee, 

and we welcome her along with the other Members. Because we 

started so late, through no fault of our own, I am going to ask the 

Members to try to limit themselves to 3 minutes as well so that 

we will have time for the second panel. And I would like to start, 

if I can with Dr. Selker. 

I understand that you have been a proponent of a voter-verified 

audio audit trail. Next week we are going to deal with auditing, 

but can you explain how that would work? 

Mr. SELKER. Today’s voting machines, electronic voting ma- chines, have audio output, and if you simply had that go into a $50 

tape recorder that tape records when there is noise coming into it, 

and from there into your ears, you are getting a verification record 

that did not go through a computer. It is not produced by—independently of you hearing it. And if it happens while you are voting, 

it actually helps people with disabilities because it corroborates the 

information that you are seeing, helping people with reading disabilities, helping people with cognitive disabilities of other sorts, 

and also it turns out that people find the errors, and that is what 

we like about it. 

So now you take that tape, and the tape drive is a much more 

reliable drive than any of the printers that we have been able to 

find. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Clark, I was interested in your testimony on 

how satisfied your State has been with the thermal ballots and 

your desire to make sure that what works for you is not disturbed, 

if I can put words in your mouth. 

We had a hearing in the 109th Congress where we got a very different point of view from Ohio that has, I think, the same system 

with thermal paper, and they showed us things that were all 

jammed up and that didn’t work. 

Do you know—have you been lucky, or have they done something 

wrong, or do you have any idea why there has been such a disparate experience between the two States? 

Mr. CLARK. No, ma’am, I don’t. I can tell you what we have done 

in Mississippi. Last year we rolled them out in the early part of 

the year. We had primaries in June, and we had the general election in November. My staff in the Secretary of State’s Office did 

more than 1,200 training sessions all over the State, in every corner of the State. And then, of course, we trained the county election 

officials, and they went out and did hundreds and hundreds of 

more demonstrations. 

Education is at least 90 percent of the fight. And so we had hundreds of folks or actually thousands of folks, considering all the poll 

workers who worked hard to get prepared, and our experience was 

quite good. 

In terms of problems, the first day we had an election, which was 

last June, in our primary, of our 77 counties that use the DREs for 

the very first time, there were problems in two counties because a 

technician set them up incorrectly, and it took us a few hours to 

get that fixed. But other than that, it worked quite well. 

And I will tell you that the folks who, in my opinion, liked them 

best are retired citizens, and those are the folks who tend to have 


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indigestion, in my experience, because they are just a little bit suspicious a lot ahead of time. But after they have done it one time, 

they love them. So I think simply education is the key. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I am going to set an example and stop questioning 

with 26 seconds to go and ask our Ranking Member Mr. McCarthy 

if he has questions. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. First of all, I will just go right back to the secretary of state, Mr. Eric Clark. 

A couple of things you stated. You talked about time line. You 

talked about the dollar amount not being enough, and you are referring to the bill which is now before us. I want to make sure that 

is correct what I was hearing from you. And you said you had 77 

out of the 80 that used the touch screen, and they found it very 

supportive. 

Mr. CLARK. That is right. Our experience has been very positive. 

I don’t want to take too much of your time. We have 82 counties 

in Mississippi. Two of them had already bought touch-screen voting 

machines with their own money pre-HAVA, and those machines 

don’t have a paper trail, a voter-verifiable paper audit trail. But 

then of the remaining 80 counties, our legislation said counties can 

opt in and take the State-purchased machine, or they can opt out 

and get their own, buy their own machine by their own manner. 

Seventy-seven of our eighty remaining counties opted in. And our 

experience last year, rolling them out first election, was extremely 

positive. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. CRS has a new report out this month saying 

most county election officials are happy with the systems they 

have, but are unhappy with the systems they don’t have. 

If I could ask Diane, I found your testimony very interesting, and 

I need a little more explanation. Were you saying for accessibility, 

those that use DRE and added on the VPAT, the VPAT was not 

working, the paper for accessibility, and when was that? Can you 

give me a few examples of where it is used? 

Ms. GOLDEN. The core DRE system is all electronic. So the voter 

interacts with it electronically, and it is stored electronically. All of 

that can be fully accessible because things that are electronic are 

easy to manipulate. So text can go to audio, text can be enlarged, 

I can use switch input. 

What happened when paper got added onto the end of the electronic is then there is print on a piece of paper attached to the side 

of this machine, and no longer can the person with the disability 

see it to verify it. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Do you know of any technology that could? 

Ms. GOLDEN. Scan it back in. That is what needs to happen. 

There needs to be some sort of a fixed scanner. The most direct, 

simplest solution—and not to argue with if there are better independent verification techniques, there absolutely could be, but if 

you are going to take what is out there now and try to add onto 

it again to make it accessible, there needs to be a fixed scanner so 

that the text that comes off that printer can be scanned, sent back 

to the electronic interface, and then however I marked it originally, 

however I read it originally, audio, large print, I am using switches 

to verify it, finally cast it; all of those interfaces are available to 

me. 


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Mr. MCCARTHY. Is that technology out there today? 

Ms. GOLDEN. Sure. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Do you have any cost estimates? 

Ms. GOLDEN. Not right now. It is building it into—you have a 

voting system that the printer was added onto. Now you are adding 

onto the add-on. So it is just in a research and development perspective. It is not the way you want to go about doing something 

because you are adding onto adding on. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Is anyone selling this product? 

Ms. GOLDEN. The only systems out there that use scanners are 

scanning a bar code. So the printer that has been attached—or, for 

example, if you are familiar with the vote by phone system, it is 

an audio interface. I am voting by phone. It prints a ballot that 

also has a bar code on it, and there is an eyeball scanner. The vote 

ballot drops into a basket or box, the eyeball scanner scans the bar 

code, the bar code then comes back to me auditorily. So it is reading the bar code on the paper. It is not reading the human readable 

print on the paper. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Sorry. Time is up. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Madam Chairman. 

The CHAIRWOMAN. Thank you. Thank you for convening this important hearing today. We welcome you as our new Chairperson, 

but this is a very important hearing. Just this morning we had, I 

guess, about eight vendors demonstrating and displaying their 

wares on voting machines, and there was one who said he had the 

perfect voting machine. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Just one? 

The CHAIRWOMAN. At least he was arrogant enough to say that. 

But getting to voting machines, we know that that is really the 

issue here with reference to voters, knowing that when they cast 

the vote, the vote will count, and it will be accurate and secure. 

Ms. Golden, assuming that voter-verified paper ballots will be required in 2008, and let me ask each of you, do you think that we 

will be ready for a mandate for paper ballots required, verified 

paper ballots required in 2008, paper trails? 

Ms. GOLDEN. I could answer really quickly in terms of the accessibility piece. No. It is just an awfully short time line to try to fix 

the two access problems that we still have in existing products related to print. 

Mr. SELKER. In my experience, the paper trails have not been reliable, and they have not been verifiable nor accountable. As soon 

as we get good equipment that makes better records, makes 

records that actually improve elections, that is a great thing to 

have a better second-chance voting approach. 

Today I watch as, you know, optical scan ballots are taken into 

back rooms to be counted. I watch as paper trails, printers are 

opened up to be fixed during the day. I mean, I personally watched 

these things. And I think that we have to first make these things 

work and show that they actually can find the problems that people have. 

The CHAIRWOMAN. Let me ask you, you said you do not think 

paper trails are reliable. Is that what you said? And yet how do you 

convince the voter that they are not reliable? They tend to think 


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that this is it. If you don’t have it, there is no point in going to the 

voting booth because their vote is not going to count. 

Mr. SELKER. I watched in Nevada when they rolled out the first 

paper trails throughout the State, and one of the first polling 

places I went to, a guy came out of the booth and he started stammering, ‘‘But how do I know that my vote counted? There is no 

paper trail.’’ and he had just—he had just experienced the first 

paper trail roll-out throughout a State. 

So the advocates have been extremely good at getting people to 

get the rhetoric. The question is when people experience it, will 

they believe they are even experiencing it? You will see over and 

over again people trying to open the paper trail printers because 

the word ‘‘receipt’’ used to be used. So they think they will get a 

receipt, when, in fact, there is going to be a record that is going 

to, hopefully, be held safe and sound in the balloting. 

The CHAIRWOMAN. My time is up already. 

Ms. LOFGREN. We have our colleague from California Susan 

Davis. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you. I appreciate your all being here. 

As we sit and talk about these issues, you feel like you are at 

the grocery store. Paper or plastic. And whether we can—and I am 

just wondering whether you think there is common ground on that 

issue; specifically that we could be or should be focusing on that 

perhaps has not been addressed, because people either feel comfortable with scanner ballots or with the DRE, and I am wondering 

where do you think that common ground is? 

Mr. CLARK. My response would be that in terms of voter confidence, and I think that is what you are asking about. My experience in Mississippi has been extremely positive. We did the rollouts of the DREs with the voter-verifiable paper trail in the middle 

of the national debate—except ‘‘debate’’ is too nice of a word—in 

the middle of the national hoopla about this very issue, and the 

machines worked well. And the fact that we had the paper trail 

gave voters the confidence that their vote was being counted. 

If I am—if you would indulge me for just a moment. There is a 

fundamental flaw in the logic of this debate; that is, there seems 

to be a sense that somewhere back in the past, there was a system 

that worked better, and I can guarantee you there was not. The 

machines that we have in Mississippi now are by far more accurate 

than anything that we have ever had before or that has ever existed before. And so the election is more accurate than elections 

have ever been. Just a few years ago it was not uncommon to have, 

in some cases, 15, 18 percent undervote in some elections, and now 

these machines have essentially ended that problem. 

And so it is way more—the glass is way more than half full. 

Mr. SELKER. I want to corroborate that and say we now have several States that have less than half a percent residual. We believed 

in 2001 the lowest you could go because of protest votes was 1 percent. It is just remarkable. 

The fact is that people are comfortable with the voting systems 

that they use. That is what exit polls tell you, and what we—I remember talking to this 80–year-old in Nevada, and I asked her, 

how did you find that experience? She had had the hardest experience all day. She rolled out of her mouth, ‘‘Well, those punch cards 


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were terrible. The leverage machines, I could never find anything. 

The optical scans I couldn’t read. This is so fabulous.’’ and I just 

couldn’t believe she put it all in one sentence what she felt about 

that. 

The big print people like high-contrast things. You know, if you 

do one raise per screen, you can get people to have a lot less errors. 

But I think that we are in a fantastic position now to improve elections with the technologies that we are now starting to get better. 

Mr. PIERCE. My experience in Cook County in Chicago are people 

with disabilities are very satisfied and pleased that more options 

are available and more flexibility has happened. There is limitations with the machines that are available for this paper system, 

and those have access issues of their own. 

Mrs. DAVIS. I was going to follow up. 

In the disability community, which individuals have the greatest 

difficulty voting, and is there a way to kind of focus in on that particularly? 

Mr. PIERCE. It is generally blind persons and those with some 

kind of motor impairments who have difficulty holding a pencil or 

pen in their hand and handling paper and manipulating paper 

would be the—is my observation. 

Mr. SELKER. Fifteen percent of Americans have reading disabilities. Those people, drawing those eyes across the ballot, whatever 

the ballot is, is a problem. If you take a look at the ballots in Massachusetts, we only have the last names of the candidates on there, 

and you have to go across the ballots to get to the bubble. I think 

there are a lot of people with problems, and I think the sightless 

are among them, but not at all the largest number. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you. 

I had an opportunity to go review a number of those machines 

today. I just want to thank the Chairwoman for making those accessible to us so that we would have that opportunity. And one of 

them, in particular, I did find that was supposed to help the disability, I was having a little difficulty with it. 

So I think we all have to try them out and try and understand 

where some of the problems are. I know the problem I was having 

was—they were talking about having that fixed. But it was interesting to me that I was having a little difficulty with that hand 

motor coordination, I think. 

Thank you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. And that is from someone who votes a lot, all day 

every day. 

I would like to thank this panel for taking the time to be with 

us today personally, and especially for your written testimony 

which is going to be key to us as we move forward looking at this 

issue. We are really honored by your presence. Thank you so much. 

The CHAIRWOMAN. Madam Chair, may I just say, I am very impressed with this panel, but more so the secretary of state of Mississippi. And I am going to—hopefully we get back with you at a 

later date to really look at what you have because it seems like a 

great success story. 

Mr. CLARK. Thank you, Madam Chair. You are very kind. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you all very much. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Let me welcome panel number two. 


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This is a great opportunity for the committee to gain insight into 

the technical issues of these machines, and I think, as has been 

mentioned, there is a great anxiety among many people in the 

country about whether or not their vote is being counted accurately, not accurately. 

People—since I am from the Silicon Valley, I know you will all 

take this in the right way. This is our Geek Squad here. We value 

you are here to talk a little bit about the technology and to give 

us the benefit of your expertise and your points of view. 

So I wonder if we could just start with Mr. Zimmerman here 

from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and move on to Dr. Williams. 

STATEMENT OF MATT ZIMMERMAN, STAFF ATTORNEY, ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION; HUGH J. GALLAGHER, 

MANAGING DIRECTOR, ELECTION SYSTEM ACQUISITION 

AND MANAGEMENT SERVICES, INC.; BRIAN BEHLENDORF, 

FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, COLLABNET; 

DAVID WAGNER, Ph.D., ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY 

OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY; AND BRIT WILLIAMS, Ph.D., 

PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION 

SYSTEMS, KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY 

STATEMENT OF MATT ZIMMERMAN 

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you 

today on this important topic. I am a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, member-supported civil liberty organization that challenges industry, 

government and the courts to protect rights in the emerging digital 

world. 

This discussion is about many things, but at its heart is the real 

issue of how the current generation of voting systems has relegated, in a structural way, real transparency to a secondary value. 

Given the time, my aim here is to touch briefly on a number of experiences that we have encountered that I think highlights some 

of the problems that are being caused or exacerbated by closed election systems, problems that be can be alleviated to a large extent 

by a move towards an open- or closed-source regime. 

First, election monitoring, as a general matter, suffers in its ability to uncover and act upon useful information. Despite many documented problems through many election-monitoring efforts, despite 

these documented problems which are often not documented by 

election officials themselves, incidents were not investigated or investigated in only a limited way by the very election officials and 

vendors whose decisions and actions were at issue. 

Second, and more important from my standpoint, postelection 

litigation aimed at investigating such suspect machine performance 

and correcting problems that appear to have resulted in incorrect 

election outcomes have fared little better. For example, EFF currently serves as cocounsel in Fedder v. Gallagher, a suit questioning the administration of a 2006 congressional race in Sarasota. 

This is a different race than is right now before the House. Far 

from accommodating the legitimate concerns of the Sarasota voters, 


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the State, the county, and the vendors closed ranks here and continued to prevent the independent type of inquiry into the source 

code and other relevant materials that we think is necessary. 

Over the past several years, I have had the distinct pleasure of 

working on this and related issues in an ever-growing community 

of very passionate people of all stripes who sometimes disagree and 

disagree very passionately about tactics. But a common thread that 

holds us all together is a shared belief that whatever the individual 

technological solution turns out to be, secrecy cannot continue to 

operate as a cornerstone of electronic administration. Voters want 

to be able to cast ballots and to have their ballots counted, but even 

more than that, they need to be convinced that the process is a fair 

and accurate one. 

This perpetually increasing interest of the general public in the 

literal mechanics of the electoral process is, to borrow a computer 

programming term, a feature and not a bug. This is a good thing, 

not a bad thing. And I respectfully suggest that Congress should 

not be in the business of trying to dissuade the public from 

prioritizing transparency over a single component of the proprietary interest of vendors. 

Thank you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. 

[The statement of Mr. Zimmerman follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. We are lucky to have Dr. Williams, a professor of 

computer science from Kennesaw State University. 

STATEMENT OF BRIT WILLIAMS 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Thank you. I want to begin by thanking you, 

Madam Chairwoman, for giving me this opportunity to appear before you. I have worked in this area of evaluating voting systems 

for over 20 years. I appreciate the opportunity to share this experience with you. 

If you look at the definition of ‘‘open source,’’ you will find that 

it talks about making the source code available to the public and 

allowing users to alter them. Nowhere in the definition or the literature does it mention that open source is a mechanism for testing source scope or establishing the validity of source scope. And 

there seems to be a general conception that source scope is unavailable to be reviewed, and this is not the case. 

In my experience over the last 20 years, everyone I am aware of 

who has any need to evaluate or any legitimate need to evaluate 

source code has had access to it. 

I have been evaluating voting systems for the State of Georgia 

since 1986, and I have had in my possession the source code of 

every voting system that has been used in the State of Georgia 

during that period. So the source code is available. It is not available to the general public. And I have got some serious concerns 

over whether the source code should be available to the general 

public, because the general public includes everything from teenage 

hackers to foreign terrorists, and I don’t think this is what the 

committee has in mind. 

So, in my opinion, open source code is not a good idea. But 

should the source code be available for evaluation? Absolutely, but 

under very carefully controlled conditions that, number one, protect 

the proprietary nature of the source code itself, but, more important, protect the security of the United States and its elections. 

So right now, for example, source code is evaluated at the Federal level, and it is archived there. It is evaluated at the State 

level, and it is archived there. So it is available. 

And what I would like to end with is a recommendation for evaluating source code, and I am using a model that was just used in 

the State of Florida to evaluate the source code that I believe you 

were involved in that. And I will leave him to talk about that. 

But number one, I think the evaluation of a source code should 

be under the auspices of a State election organization; that the individuals that would be evaluating that source code would be selected by that State; and that the election official would then apply 

to the EAC for a license, if you please, to obtain that source code. 

I believe that the individuals who would participate in that should 

be subject to background checks by the Office of Homeland Security, and I believe that they should be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement where they agree to protect the proprietary nature 

of the vendor software. 

And if I can have about another 10 seconds. 

The final thing I believe is that there should be severe penalties 

for disclosing that software to any unauthorized person. And I 

think that should be spelled out in the code, because we have an 


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anecdotal evidence that our patent laws and our current laws on 

protecting proprietary software are not adequate to protecting voting system software. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you, Dr. Williams. 

[The statement of Mr. Williams follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. We also have Dr. David Wagner, who is a professor of computer science at California, Berkeley. 

STATEMENT OF DAVID WAGNER 

Mr. WAGNER. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. 

My name is David Wagner. I am an associate professor of computer science at U.C. Berkeley, and I work in computer security 

and electronic voting. 

E-voting was introduced for laudable reasons; however, in addressing one problem, we have created several new ones. First of 

all, e-voting brings risk to election security. Over the past 4 years, 

independent researchers have discovered security vulnerabilities in 

voting machines used throughout the country. I will point out that 

our State and Federal certification processes designed to evaluate 

these voting systems failed to discover those vulnerabilities. 

Would disclosing voting systems source codes help with the security risks? Yes, potentially, but with some very important caveats. 

Access to source code has improved security in other areas of computing, and I expect it could have the same effect here, too. That 

said, source code analysis does have important limitations. Source 

code analysis cannot—source code disclosure cannot solve the security problem. It cannot demonstrate that our voting machines are 

trustworthy. 

When it comes to security, another path is to reduce our reliance 

upon software by moving to software-independent voting systems. 

For instance, adopting voter-verified paper records and routine audits of those records would be one way to achieve this. In my opinion, software independence would make source code disclosure less 

urgent from a security point of view. 

A second problem is that the spread of voting machines has degraded the transparency of our elections. The secrecy surrounding 

the software makes it difficult for the public to observe and exercise meaningful oversight over the administration of our elections. 

Let me give you an analogy. How would you feel if your taxes 

were computed for you each year by the IRS using a secret formula 

that you weren’t allowed to see? I suspect many people would probably be pretty concerned about that, just as they are concerned by 

the fact that their votes are counted using secret codes. 

Would source code help improve transparency? It sure would. 

Source code disclosure would help restore some of the transparency 

that was lost when we moved to electronic voting. For instance, disclosure would eliminate the vendors’ information advantage over 

their customers and over the public. Today vendors make claims 

about their machines, and members of the public can’t get access 

to the information they need to independently evaluate those 

claims. Source disclosure would enable candidates, political parties 

and interested members of the public to commission independent 

analysis of the machines and get a second opinion, something they 

cannot do today. 

If we accept that source code disclosure is a good goal in the long 

run, there are, however, some difficult challenges about how to get 

there. Unfortunately, today’s voting machines are not designed for 

disclosure, and that creates several challenges. One of those challenges is that, based on my experience reviewing source code from 


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two of the four major vendors, it is my prediction that immediate 

disclosure of source code could easily lead to discovery of serious 

problems in all of the vendors’ machines, and that would overwhelm the ability of the vendors and the election officials to respond in a single election cycle. 

So given these challenges, it might make sense to phase disclosure in over time. And in my written testimony, I have described 

several ways one might manage the transition by gradually increasing the scope of disclosure over several years. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. 

[The statement of Mr. Wagner follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Next we have Mr. Hugh Gallagher, who is the 

managing director of Election System Acquisition and Management 

Services. 

STATEMENT OF HUGH J. GALLAGHER 

Mr. GALLAGHER. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to be here today. 

I think you are hearing from this panel relative to this topic that 

there may sound like there is a divergence of opinion, when, in 

fact, I think we all agree that the number one thing we want is 

transparency in the process. We all concur on that, that we want 

the voters on election night to go home, go to bed knowing full well 

that the results of the election were fair, accurate and represent 

the will of the people. 

What I would like to focus on is the concern—I concur with my 

colleagues to my right that open source code is probably something 

that is going to have to be considered, but the question is the context in which it is going to be considered. And so in keeping with 

Dr. Williams’ thought process, one of the things I would like to look 

at is the common ground between all of the various groups that are 

here. 

I believe, whether it is a third party at the State level or the 

Election Assistance Commission, I think we are needing to have an 

organization established that we might want to call the Voting 

Software Control and Distribution Board; an independent, trusted 

third party that would take possession of the source code and ownership of the source codes once that code has been approved by the 

respective ITAs. So once the vendor has released it to the ITAs for 

testing and certification, upon certification would go to the trusted 

third party supported by the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology, as an example, the idea being that the public would 

have access to this software under special controlled circumstances, 

probably not too dissimilar to what we see in the Library of Congress where there are historical records and information that you 

have to request, petition, go in and schedule to go in; a controlled 

environment in a single physical location where it can be monitored—where the activities can be monitored. 

The process might look something like this, where the vendors, 

after they are done with their testing and certification process, notify the ITAs that once they are done and approved, they would go 

to the independent third party. The VSDC, the Voting Software 

Distribution Control Board, would take possession and configuration control. Vendors would be notified when clients require the 

software, and we might look at a process where this third party actually distributes the software independent of the vendors, and 

then the vendor has no contact with the final code once it leaves 

the ITAs. 

There are a number of processes and details we would have to 

look at in terms of implementation, but I think what this does is 

start to bridge the concerns that both sides have, allows the access 

people are looking for, but not the free, unencumbered access, 

which I do think poses a risk in the public domain. 

Thank you very much. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you. 


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[The statement of Mr. Gallagher follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. And, finally, we have Mr. Brian Behlendorf, who 

is the founder and CTO of CollabNet and also a director for 

Mozilla. So thank you for Firefox. 

STATEMENT OF BRIAN BEHLENDORF 

Mr. BEHLENDORF. I want to specifically talk about open source 

software a bit more, give you a background on it, and help you understand how it has really become essential to the software industry today, and where the issue of security lies with it, and how 

really it can be a big solution to that problem. 

The software industry has seen a series of transformations 

throughout its brief history. The first transformation was initially 

called open systems, and this was the idea that we could build software that would run on multiple types of hardware, a fairly radical 

notion for its time. 

The second major transformation was called open standards. 

This was the idea that companies could get together and talk about 

common data formats, common protocols to share data and build 

systems that, by talking to each other, build greater value for customers and for the industry as a whole. 

Both of these transformations were disruptive transformations. 

Some of these companies grew and benefited from them, among 

them Microsoft, Sun, and Cisco; other companies resisted and in 

some cases perished. 

The third major transformation in this linear series of transformations is open source software. Open source software is software defined as being licensed under a very generous copyright license, licenses that allow many kinds of use at zero price, provide 

access to the underlying source code, allow modification and improvement by recipients, and allows those recipients the right to 

share those improvements with others. This approach can result in 

fewer defects, greater flexibility, more rapid innovation and a more 

competitive marketplace than the proprietary alternatives. 

Today every major technology vendor releases some portion of its 

intellectual property under an open source license. The business 

models behind this investment are a mixture of support services 

and strategic opportunities for other proprietary offerings. Sun, 

HP, and IBM all have significant revenue streams based on open 

source software. Even Microsoft has acknowledged the value on 

open source by releasing some minor software under such a license. 

On the customer side, open source software is used everywhere 

from critical Wall Street financial systems where security is paramount, and the teenage hackers and terrorists would be just as attracted, to such commodity devices as cell phones and TiVos. Within the public sector, we see open source used today in the Pentagon, in the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Homeland 

Security. In all of the above examples, open source and transitional 

proprietary software can peacefully coexist. 

Is open software guaranteed to be more secure? No. It is challenging for even the most competent engineers to write a secure 

code. The only widely recognized indisputable method to designing 

and building highly secure systems is massive developer peer review. The more widely inspected a code is, the smaller the chance 

of undiscovered defects. This extends to the development process 


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itself. The larger the development team around a given body of 

code, and the more the deliberations of that team are open to the 

outside world, the more reliable their designs are likely to be. 

This community approach is the key ingredient in any successful 

and secure open source project. 

In the interest of time, I will point your attention to the open 

SSL project example that I give in the written testimony. 

Finally, the most useful aspect to choosing an open source project 

is the inherent protection it can give against vendor log-in. Customers can switch vendors without surrendering any legal rights to 

use and extend the software. Thus, open source is a new kind of 

relationship between customer and vendor from one of dependency 

to one of cooperation. 

To summarize, open source in the software industry today is accepted, it is real, it is probusiness and procustomer, and it has a 

tremendous chance to build trust and security and proper operation 

of voting system software. 

[The statement of Mr. Behlendorf follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thanks to all of you for excellent and interesting 

testimony. 

Again, I will try—each of us will try to limit our questions to the 

same 3 minutes that you have given to us. 

Let me start with Mr. Gallagher. The EAC Commissioner, I understand, has said that disclosing source codes would help to restore public trust in the election process. And he explicitly stated 

vendors should not have the right to keep a source code a secret. 

He has called on computer scientists and election officials to work 

together to solve many of the problems related to voting systems, 

and I think in some cases it can be either problems, or perceptions 

of problems are very damaging as well. 

How do you respond to that explicit call from the EAC? 

Mr. GALLAGHER. First of all, I have tremendous respect for Commissioner Soaries. He is a great man, and a great public speaker 

if you have ever heard him. 

I don’t think we are at odds here. I don’t think anybody at this 

table is potentially at odds. I think we agree there should be some 

degree of openness. The question is in what circumstances; how 

does that actually work; what are the mechanics? 

I would submit that having things, as I understand it, and I may 

be wrong—that in a true open source environment, software environment, my particular concern is one of the attractive nuisance; 

in other words, persons coming along who might not otherwise be 

inclined for mischief all of a sudden seeing and being presented 

with an opportunity, not too dissimilar from my children, and 

wanting to exploit that opportunity to nefarious ends, or even just 

for grins and giggles. 

I think what we want is an open source environment controlled 

in some form or fashion, agreed-upon rules and procedures that everyone can subscribe to, because, as my colleague to my left was 

saying, that the more people involved, the better that withstands 

the test. The only question I would ask is what are the rules, because if you get too many cooks in the kitchen, you get too many 

recipes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I wonder, Dr. Wagner, if you could comment on 

Mr. Gallagher’s statement, and also if you could—I don’t know if 

this is to the business school or the computer science school, but 

if—the defects are going to be probably one of two kinds: either an 

intentional backdoor or a bug that was not intentional. And presumably the intentional backdoor is more easily found and resolved. Maybe not. But if we were to do an open source regime, as 

suggested by Mr. Behlendorf, what would the economic impact be? 

Would it be adverse on vendors of machines? Could they accommodate it and still flourish? What do you think the impact would be? 

Mr. WAGNER. So to the first of your questions, I think in the long 

run, until we disclose all of the source codes to the public, I believe 

that the public will be—will have concerns, will not trust and will 

express reservations over the source code. So in the long run, I believe that is where we need to head to enable the public and the 

candidates to gain confidence. 

As far as the economic impact of source code disclosure, I believe 

that there are some costs to source code disclosure, but that is easVerDate Aug 31 2005 03:37 Jul 11, 2007 Jkt 035805 PO 00000 Frm 00084 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A805.XXX A805

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ily manageable, especially through a gradual introduction of increasing disclosure. 

Ms. LOFGREN. My time has expired. So I will ask the Ranking 

Member to ask his questions. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. I apologize. I want to be quick and maybe try 

to get some yes or no answers. 

I would appreciate it if we could get everybody’s cards. I would 

like to talk to you later. 

First to Dr. Wagner, you were part of the FSU team that analyzed down there. Did you have the source code? 

Mr. WAGNER. Yes. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. And maybe to Mr. Zimmerman, you had mentioned in Fedder v. Gallagher—I read your statement here where 

you go through it. You state, with regard to your lawsuit with 

these Sarasota voters, that Florida prevented independent inquiry 

into the source code. Do you still keep that same statement after 

the FSU Study? 

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. Yes, I do. And with all due respect to David 

Wagner, who I have worked with in the past many times, I think 

he is a very fantastic scientist who I go to for information from 

time to time. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. You have used him before? 

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. In an informal way, yes. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. But you feel this is not an honest—— 

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. What has gone on in the Fedder v. Gallagher 

case, is essentially the State is deciding on its own the scope of a 

project, and I don’t even believe Mr. Wagner will say it is an expansive project that is aimed at getting all of the—find all of the 

potential problems and—— 

Mr. MCCARTHY. I understand. I don’t want to get into the case 

because I can’t go through the cases. But just on the study itself, 

do you feel that study—you don’t agree with the study even though 

he stated he had the source code? 

Mr. ZIMMERMAN. I believe that there are problems with the 

study, yes, and I would be happy to talk with you later. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Okay. Thank you. And Mr. Williams. So your 

statement—and it was kind of towards the end—you had concerns 

with hackers, with others. If you just put them all out there, you 

thought maybe testing them much like maybe the FSU study 

would be the proper way? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, 

but am I understanding that correctly? 

Mr. WILLIAMS. I am very much in favor of controlled evaluation 

of source code. I am very much opposed to just opening up the kimono, okay, because not just hackers and terrorists but well-meaning—most of our problems are not caused by bad guys. They are 

caused by well-meaning good guys. So there is no advantage to 

making it possible for any citizen to modify voting system software. 

We don’t operate voting systems that way. You get a voting system as solid as you can get it, and you freeze it. You don’t let anybody touch it. If anybody touches it, you make it go back through 

the entire sequence of tests again. So there is no advantage from 

that point of view of being able to modify and expand and customize it to your own use. That is not what we do with voting system software. The only advantage is to be able to find these supVerDate Aug 31 2005 03:37 Jul 11, 2007 Jkt 035805 PO 00000 Frm 00085 Fmt 6602 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A805.XXX A805

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posed bugs and Trojan horses and all the bad stuff, and I think 

that people like Dr. Wagner can do that in a controlled situation 

just as well as he can with an open situation. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Only because you are both Ph.Ds. Have you had 

an opportunity to read the FSU study? 

Mr. WILLIAMS. I have read most of it. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Do you agree with Mr. Zimmerman that you 

think something is wrong with the study? 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Well, I won’t agree or disagree but I will make a 

statement about the study. In my 20 years of doing this kind of 

evaluation, that is the most open, professional well-written study 

I have yet to see. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. You are 

very interesting. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Our last member is Susan Davis, who will have 

her questions answered. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all 

for being here. I think this question would really go to you, Dr. 

Wagner. Have they tested all the systems in Florida to your knowledge? And could you help us understand how that was done and 

what should have been done perhaps or going forward, what we 

ought to be looking at? 

Mr. WAGNER. Certainly. Well, I can’t speak for the state of Florida. I can’t speak for the entire audit they did. The team that I was 

involved with had a narrow mandate to look to see whether there 

were problems in the machine software provided to us that could 

have caused or created the undervote in that race there. And our 

conclusion was that it did not. 

Now, I can understand why some members would be—why there 

may be some folks who would be reluctant to trust the results of 

our study. Until everyone can choose the expert of their own choosing, I can understand why they may have concerns. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Now as part of your all—were you able to go back 

and see the testing that had been done? 

Mr. WAGNER. We were not asked to review the entire Florida 

State audit, we had a very specific mandate. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Okay. Thank you. Thinking about how the public responds. I mean, this is really all about the credibility of the systems, and whether or not if you had transparency, is there a concern that some individuals with some knowledge could actually 

frighten the public into believing that there were flaws in the system that could not be overcome? And how would that work? 

Mr. WAGNER. I think there is some concern there in the short 

term, given my experience of how full of security problems these 

machines are. In the short term, that would be a concern. I think 

that the way to address that is through a gradual transition planning where in the beginning, we begin by following Professor 

Williams’s recommendations to make the source code available to 

qualified experts, give the vendors a chance to address those problems, and prepare their systems for disclosure and gradually move 

towards a long-term goal of public disclosure. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. I think it is worth pointing out that the vendor 

in this case was a full participant in this study. Is that a fair statement? 


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Mr. WAGNER. I was pleased with their cooperation, yes. 

Ms. LOFGREN. This has been a very helpful panel. And obviously, 

your written testimony amplifies considerably on your oral testimony today. It is very, very helpful. I know it is not easy to wait 

for the Congress Members to come over from an extended vote and 

then of course to shorten because now we are terribly behind. But 

we do appreciate this, and it does make a difference in our understanding and hopefully our wisdom as we proceed. So thank you 

each and everyone. It is very much appreciated. And with that, this 

hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 3:30 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 


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