ELECTION REFORM: 

AUDITING THE VOTE 

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 20, 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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35–804 2007

ELECTION REFORM: 

AUDITING THE VOTE 

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 20, 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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(II) 

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 A. 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 A. DAVIS, California 

KEVIN MCCARTHY, California 

VERNON J. EHLERS, Michigan 


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AUDITING THE VOTE 

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELECTIONS, 

COMMITTEE ON HOUSE ADMINISTRATION, 

Washington, DC. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:50 p.m., in room 

1309, Longworth House Office Building, Hon. Zoe Lofgren (chairwoman of the subcommittee) presiding. 

Present: Representatives Lofgren, Gonzales, Davis of California, 

McCarthy, and Ehlers. 

Also Present: Representative Holt. 

Staff Present: Tom Hicks, Election Counsel; Janelle Hu, Professional Staff Member; Matt Pinkus, Professional Staff/Parliamentarian; Kristin McCowan, Chief Legislative Clerk; Gineen Beach, 

Minority Counsel; and Peter Sloan, Minority Professional Staff. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Welcome to everyone. First, apologies for our tardiness, for some reason as soon as there is a Election Subcommittee notice, the House calls at least 5 votes and makes us 

late. And so obviously, we have to go over and do our duty of voting. But it does put us in a delay mode and we do apologize. 

Last week, we had a hearing on election reform and learned 

about some of the issues surrounding the tools of voting machines 

and software as well as access to those machines for all voters. 

This week, we shift focus to what happens when the polls close, 

auditing. The Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, addressed machines and established new procedures for voting lists and registration, but auditing was not addressed. Post election audits are a tool 

to increase voter confidence in the election process. But there is no 

national standard for auditing in Federal elections. There are 

States, such as California, where the paper count takes precedence 

over the electronic one, or other States like Nevada are the reverse. 

Discrepancies are not just about paper or electronic counts. It 

also goes to the extent of audits. Connecticut has performed post 

election audits using 20 percent of precincts. Other States are as 

low as 1 percent of precincts. In addition to the extent of audits, 

they need to be conducted so they are publicly observable. And audits must, as we know, also be entirely random to avoid the possibility of tampering. 

Greater transparency through increased election scrutiny is not 

a bad thing, and having a voter verified paper trail with an automatic routine audit may go a long way to increase voter confidence 

and to deter fraud. 


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It is no secret that a number of recent elections have been determined by a very small difference of votes. And a handful of these 

are still in dispute. A failure to have paper records that can be audited could ultimately call into question the validity of a very close 

election. And it may be that an established national process for the 

audit of Federal elections would be worthwhile. 

I would like to call on the ranking member, Mr. McCarthy, for 

his opening remarks, and also invite the other Members to submit 

statements for the record. Mr. McCarthy. 

[The statement of Ms. Lofgren follows:] 


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Mr. MCCARTHY. Well, I appreciate the Chairwoman for calling 

this hearing on election audits. I do believe that all Members of 

this panel as well as our colleagues in the House are dedicated to 

ensuring that Federal elections are conducted and tabulated in a 

free and fair manner. I do want to make sure, though, that the 

Federal interest in this issue should not cloud the work of the 

State and local jurisdictions and I am happy that we have two 

States here, Ohio and Arizona, that tabulate and do an audit as 

well, so we will hear from them on the ability that we can work 

together and make sure we have fair and honest elections. Thank 

you. 

[The statement of Mr. McCarthy follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you. I would just like to note for the record 

that there was some confusion on witness notification and submission of testimony, and we are going to strive at the next hearing 

to have all our testimony submitted within the 48 hours that is 

specified in the rules and make sure that everything is shared as 

promptly as possible between the sides. 

I would like now to call upon our first panel, and, we have Mr. 

Ion, is that how it is pronounced? Sancho, who is the supervisor of 

elections from Leon County Florida. He was elected to his first 

term as supervisor of the elections in November of 1988, re-elected 

in 92, 96, 2000, 2004 and serving his fifth term in—as of January 

second 2005. He has a JD from Florida State University Law 

School, a bachelor’s degree from Stetson University. 

And we also have Mr. Matt Damschroder, who is the director of 

the Franklin County Board of Elections. And Mr. Damschroder has 

been the Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections since 

2003 and serves as the president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials. And he was the executive director of the Franklin 

County Republican Party until his appointment to the Board of 

Elections. 

STATEMENTS OF ION SANCHO, SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS, 

LEON COUNTY, FLORIDA; AND MATT DAMSCHRODER, 

FRANKLIN COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS 

Ms. LOFGREN. We welcome both of you and we have a light system here. We will ask that you summarize your written statements 

which we will have and submit for the record and try and give your 

oral remarks in about 5 minutes that will allow for questions. So 

if we may ask, Mr. Sancho first and then the other witness. 

STATEMENT OF ION SANCHO 

Mr. SANCHO. Thank you, Chairwoman Lofgren, Ranking Member 

McCarthy and committee members. Thank you for the opportunity 

to testify today. My name is Ion Sancho. I am the elected supervisor for elections for Leon County, Florida. I am a member of the 

International Association of Clerks, recorders, election officials and 

treasurers, and the election officers, the two largest professional associations for election officials in the country. I have no party affiliation. 

In my testimony today, I will focus the problems Florida has encountered over the past 6 years and how our audits—or more accurately, the lack of audit—have contributed to the current crisis in 

confidence Floridians have in their electoral system today, a crisis 

of confidence that is so critical that the incoming governor, upon 

taking office, stated that in the State of Florida, there will be— 

there will be a paper trail for every vote. 

And that is a sea change from the previous administration. 

What are audits? One dictionary definition refers to an audit as 

an official examination and verification of a accounts and records. 

Another calls it a methodical examination and review. I would like 

to say that the reason that I had to resort to the dictionary is that 

audits have no definition under Florida law. Because Florida does 

not conduct audits. Before the election, we have to do a series of 

tests, which we call logic and accuracy, and after the election, we 


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do a logic and accuracy that ensures that the machine can count 

a test step. But we never audit actual ballots or votes. And so as 

an election official, I had to resort to the dictionary to describe an 

audit. 

Which leads me to directly to the 2000 elections. In Florida, audits for any election, again, as I have mentioned, are not required. 

The closest thing that we have had in Florida election law to an 

audit was our pre-2000 recount provisions in chapter 102, which, 

depending on the closeness of the contest, could mean that every 

ballot had to be manually examined. 

These recounts are generally rare events. In my almost 20-year 

career, I have overseen four of them, and only one of these, the 

presidential race of 2000, involved a Federal race, and that recount, the only audit that we could use was terminated by the 

United States Supreme Court. All of us in Florida were embarrassed by what happened, including election officials. And this embarrassment, which the Miami Herald recorded at 70 percent dissatisfaction with our electorate, forced our public policy makers to 

act. 

The governor ordered a bipartisan task force, which held hearings across the State and produced 35 excellent recommendations, 

including audits. But audits, recounts, voter intent, were all discarded out of that task force series of recommendations and substituted in those for those audits and recounts was the assumption 

that since voting machines could never make a mistake, it was illogical then to audit any result that was produced by voting machines. And this is the current State of Florida law today. 

Let me tell you that if we were going to have the same kind of 

statistical dead heat in Florida in 2008, we would have less than 

1 percent of the ballots examined under current law. Why? Because 

under Florida law, the only ballots which can be examined in an 

audit are those ballots which could not be read by voting machine. 

That means every machine readable ballot is out of bounds in a 

recount to examine. 

In the last election, only 500 ballots out of over 92,000 ballots 

cast would be examined under a Florida recount, roughly less than 

1 percent of the ballots. Again because only these number of ballots, the overvotes and undervotes and optical scan ballots, either 

by those jurisdictions who use paper ballots in the precincts or 

those ballots received by the election official through the mail 

which are on paper, only those ballots which are nonmachine readable could be manually audited. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Sancho, the red light means your time is up, 

so could we ask you to wind up and we will go to our next witness? 

Mr. SANCHO. All right. I would urge this body to require that 

mandatory random and manual post election audits be made the 

law. Without them, no citizen, State or Federal in terms of the 

races that they focus on, can actually have any validity under Florida’s current statutory scheme that is, in fact, their votes are being 

counted. Thank you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much for that testimony. And as 

I mentioned earlier, your complete statement will be made a part 

of the record as well as the questions that follow. 


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Mr. DAMSCHRODER, now it is your turn, and I probably should 

have said when the yellow light goes on that means you have a little time left to summarize. 

STATEMENT OF MATT DAMSCHRODER 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Good afternoon, Madam Chairwoman and 

members of the committee. Franklin County is the most populous 

county of Ohio’s 15th congressional district. And during the 2006 

congressional election cycle, the 15th congressional district election 

resulted in an official margin of victory of less than one half of one 

percent or less than 1,055 votes. That general election was administered in Franklin County using direct recording electronic voting 

machines, or DREs, with a voter verified paper audit trail. 

In 2004, the Ohio General Assembly had enacted legislation requiring the VVPAT to be included in all DRE’s beginning in 2006. 

I was the only election official in Ohio who testified in support of 

VVPAT technology. But I had two concerns with Ohio’s legislation. 

And they are the two concerns that I have with H.R. 811. 

First, the VVPAT should not be, in my opinion, the ballot of 

record. With the VVPAT as the official ballot, it is possible that an 

otherwise properly cast and accurately recorded ballot on the DRE 

might not be recounted in a close election due to paper jams or poll 

worker error loading the paper backwards. The question what constitutes a vote, having long been determined in Ohio for punch 

cards and optically scanned paper ballots, has seemed wrong to me 

at the time and wrong to me now that we would institute a new 

voter intent question that could cause a voter’s properly cast and 

accurately recorded vote to go uncounted. 

Second, the VVPAT requirement should go into effect only after 

the Election Assistance Commission had developed standards for 

the function and operation of the technology. 

I am concerned that by enacting portions of this legislation, Congress might be making precisely the same mistake that Ohio made 

by mandating changes to the technology by date certain before 

operational standards are established and the technology is fully 

developed and tested. 

Essentially in Ohio and in Franklin County specifically, our $14 

million investment partially included HAVA funds and partially including local taxpayer funds would likely have to be dumped because our VVPAT technology does not conform to the requirements 

of this legislation. 

Beginning with our first use of the VVPAT in a special election 

of February of 2006, we began voluntarily conducting audits of the 

VVPAT to the electronic record. 

As a part of that, we determined that there were instances where 

the paper printers did jam or that poll workers did make errors in 

loading the paper tapes backwards. So as we prepared for the recounts, the mandatory recount in the 15th congressional district 

election, we knew that there were going to be problems and with 

no definition in Ohio law from the Secretary of State in answering 

that very important voter intent question on the VVPAT, the Board 

of Elections engaged both of the campaigns to basically create 

ground rules for the conduct of the recount of how we would treat 

a ballot in the event that we came to a jam or a blank tape. 


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The hand tally of the VVPAT for this Federal recount took 2,000 

employee hours. And again, that was to hand tally 10 percent of 

the total votes in Franklin County. 

I would like to bring one specific instance to the committee’s attention that demonstrates the importance of clear and objective 

guidelines to define voter intent on the VVPAT. On one particular 

paper tape, the recount team encountered a paper jam and there 

was no indication on the paper tape that the voter’s voting session 

had ended in a ballot properly being cast. At the conclusion of the 

recount of that tape, the total number of hand tallied votes excluding the so-called jammed vote on the paper tape equaled the total 

number of votes cast on the machine. To further verify that the socalled jammed vote should not be counted, the recount team examined the ballot image log and the electronic event log, both of which 

validated that there were only the specified number of ballots cast 

in the machine. And the event log actually showed that at the time 

displayed on the paper tape that the printer had jammed. 

Additionally, the poll workers followed their responsibilities and 

noted in their records that a paper tape had jammed, that they 

cancelled the ballot and allowed the voter to vote on a different machine. 

When using VVPAT technology which introduces new question of 

voter intent as I described, vague and subjective language, such as 

811’s phrase, preponderance of evidence or clear and convincing 

evidence is an open invitation to litigation. In Franklin County, 

that could have meant that litigation would have required weeks 

beyond the end of the recount and that possibly a representative 

from the 15th congressional district not being seated when Congress convened, also look towards 2008, it could possibly mean that 

our recounts and other audits would not be concluded by the time 

the Federal electors are seated. 

Our experience in this recount demonstrates the accuracy of electronic voting systems and the benefit of State and local control over 

election audit recount definitions and procedures. 

[The statement of Mr. Damschroder follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much and congratulations on having a precisely 5-minute statement. I would like to begin the questions, if I may, and I will start with Mr. Sancho. 

You have been an election official for a long time and have had 

substantial experience. In your experience, do you have an opinion 

on what voting system or machine makes conducting an audit easier, more transparent and accurate? 

Mr. SANCHO. Yes, I do. I believe that a document—right now the 

only thing we have is paper, marked by the voter’s own mark, in 

their own handwriting, is the kind of evidence that would allow me 

to do a complete audit. 

I got into the area of elections in 1988 because in 1986 I ran for 

a local government position, and our supervisor of elections negligently programmed the voting machines so that they jammed on 

Election Day—through, it was not nefarious it was just negligence. 

But it meant that upwards of 5,000 Leon County voters could not 

vote on that Election Day. And when I ran for and got that position 

2 years later, the number one thing on my agenda was to create 

a voting system and a process that would allow the voters to know 

what the votes were, even if I negligently programmed the voting 

machines. 

So I wanted a system that would have a backup to the technology that I could confirm the validity of the votes. And that led 

me to optical scan voting technology, which is emerging in the late 

1980s and early 1990s. And it was a technology that would allow 

every voter to mark that paper ballot and then I could scan them 

and get the result to the media quickly and to the candidates. But 

if there were any disputes over my handling of the ballots or of the 

election workers handling of the technology, the evidence resided in 

the form of optical scanned ballots which no one need use technology to get a 100 percent accurate count. And that is what we 

selected on in 1992. And the results are clear. In the 2000 botched 

election, Leon County had a residual or error rate of less than 1 

fifth of 1 percent. 

My neighboring county had an error rate of 12.4 percent, which 

means that only 86 percent of the citizens that tried to vote in the 

presidential race actually even ended up having their vote properly 

recorded. That—all of us that used the optical scan technology in 

Florida had an error rate of less than 1 percent. 

And we were able to recount our ballots without a problem. The 

punch card and the central count systems failed the citizens and 

they were banned. 

Ms. LOFGREN. The governor of your State has recently made—is 

he—is the State of Florida moving toward that system? 

Mr. SANCHO. We are making steps in a very, very good direction. 

House Bill 2166, which was introduced by Senator Villalobos, at 

the behest of the governor would replace every touch screen voting 

machine at the precinct on Election Day with an optical scanner. 

And that is a very excellent first move. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Let me ask you, you have—correct me if this is 

wrong—but my understanding is that you did some testing to see 

whether voting machines could be hacked or not hacked. Could you 

describe or report to us on your findings in that regard? 


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Mr. SANCHO. Yes. After the 2004 election, I was approached by 

a British journalist who had been observing elections across the 

country, and I guess I struck him as sort of an honest type of guy. 

And he said, I think we can hack your voting system. And I said 

I don’t think so. But he said, would you be open to having an independent test to see whether or not your system would be compromised? And I thought about it for a while. We had some negotiations. And I answered yes. 

And what we found over the course of six tests that took 11 

months to conduct, was in fact a huge, huge security flaw in the 

process that would allow anyone with insider access to actually 

prestuff the electronic ballot box and have those numbers alter the 

outcome of an election. And it would not be detected in the normal 

canvass process. 

This was shocking to me. And quite frankly, it confirms my own 

sense that even when you are using a paper-based system, unless 

you actually audit it, it can be vulnerable to a whole host of security attacks which the systems administrator would not even be 

aware is occurring. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I am going to turn it over to my ranking member, 

Mr. McCarthy. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Thank you, Madam Chair. 

Question for Franklin. Ohio has automatically, if you are in the 

half percent to 1 percent, you do the audit. 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. That’s correct. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Now you have raised some good points here because you have gone through a little legislation that we may bring 

up later with the VVPAT. You said in your statement that the 

paper should not be the ballot of record. 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. That is correct. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Could you elaborate on that a little more and 

why? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. My belief is that the voter verified paper 

audit trail should not be the ballot of record, and the reason I believe that is when you compare an electronic touch screen system 

to an optical scan system, with the optical scan as Mr. Sancho 

mentioned, the voter as marking the ballots themselves, the electronic system in Franklin, Ohio with the voter verified paper audit 

trail the voter is marking the ballot electronically, and they are 

verifying that paper record. 

In situations with a recount of the—in Ohio of an optical scan 

system, you hand tally a small universe. The minimum requirement is 3 percent of the optical scan paper ballots. And then you 

run them through the tabulator and compare the hand tally to the 

electronic tabulator result. If they match, then you rerun all of the 

ballots electronically. Basically, the hand audit of the paper is to 

prove the veracity of the electronic. 

To me, I believe that it is not recommended to create a higher 

standard for an alternate voting system so that we should use the 

voter verified paper audit trail as it has been named in Ohio, and 

as it is named, I believe, in this legislation for that precise purpose 

to audit the electronic results. When the paper ballot becomes—— 

Mr. MCCARTHY. So you are saying the paper should not be the 

final decision maker? 


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Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Should not be, because as I shared in my testimony, in some instances, the paper jams—— 

Mr. MCCARTHY. You said that paper jammed and it shows that 

it jams and the people did what was right even though you trained 

them, you gave them enough training and computer showed that 

it did jam? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Correct. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. So did that ballot get counted properly and it 

wasn’t double-counted? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. It was not double-counted because when the 

paper jammed, the machines are designed, such as the machine 

will not allow the voter to continue casting ballot when the paper 

is jammed or is not present. So when the, in this instance, when 

the printer jammed, the voter noticed that the machine stopped allowing him to vote or her to vote, notified a poll worker. The poll 

worker cancelled the ballot on that machine and took the voter to 

a different machine where she could cast her ballot and the 

jammed machine was not used again until a technician could come 

and unjam the paper. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Now you said it took 2,000 hours to do this audit 

or recount. 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Correct. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. And you believe audits are good. 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Yes, I do. And that is why we did three audits before the 2006 general voluntarily. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. How many races in Ohio come within 3 percent? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. I don’t know for sure. In Franklin County, it 

is very few. This congressional district was very unique in the political balance of the jurisdiction, also the characteristics of the contest. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Would you audit every race? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. I would not. In the situation of the previous 

audits that we did, we randomly selected a handful in two of the 

contests that were a single issue. In the primary, we randomly selected, I think, about a dozen contests of the probably 50 that were 

on the countywide ballot and tallied those from 3 percent of the 

machines, so I don’t believe it is necessary to tally the entire universe. I am not a statistician, but all the statisticians that I have 

spoken with lead me to believe that with that form of mathematics, 

you can test a small universe to learn with virtual certainty the 

characteristics of the entire universe. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Fortunately, we have a person that knows math 

very well on the committee that could probably answer that for us. 

But let me ask one question to the individual from Florida. Would 

you audit every race? 

Mr. SANCHO. No, I would randomly select races, but I think that 

you with particularly the focus here at Federal races, I think you 

have to look at the Federal races that has to be included one of the 

Federal races. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Would you pick it based upon the difference in 

the race? Or would you pick every Federal race? Would you say if 

a race came between 3 percentage points, 5 percentage points, 1 

percentage point, 10 percentage points? 


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Mr. SANCHO. Well, in Florida, we basically have no more than 

three Federal races on any particular general election ballot. So if 

you wanted to do all the feds, you could do that. The 2,000-hour 

time frame that was described by Matt is essentially a series of 4, 

I believe it is 5, 4-person teams Matt? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Mmh-hmm. 

Mr. SANCHO. And how long did that take you to do? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Seven days. 

Mr. SANCHO. Seven days, 5 four-person teams, the number 2,000 

sounds large, but an audit that takes 7 days that examines 10 percent of the vote in the largest jurisdiction in Ohio, actually I commend him on doing it within 7 days. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. So could you, timewise, if you were required to 

do every Federal race, could you do it? 

Mr. SANCHO. Absolutely in three races, random selection—and 

not—I would like to say I think you have to do a—my own analysis 

of the statistics involved, if the race is very close, you would not 

want to use the same number to statistically sample a race in 

which the margin is 25 percent apart. I think a tiered system, the 

closer the race is, the larger your sample is going to have to be if 

you are going to get the level of confidence—and in my mind, you 

are talking about 99 percent plus confidence rate—in order to establish that what you do has meaning. 

Because that is really what we are trying to accomplish here. We 

are not trying to just do an audit so that we do an audit and we 

have done an audit. We are trying to do an audit so that the individuals involved in the race, their supporters and everyone concerned can know with confidence that result is the result. 

Ms. LOFGREN. I would like to call Judge Gonzalez, our colleague 

from Texas. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Thank you, very much, Madam Chairwoman. 

And the question will go to—is it Damschroder? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Damschroder. Correct. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. I am new to the committee and appreciate this 

opportunity. It is a education for all of us, the general public out 

there many times will be confusing audit with recount and the 

manner in which you would conduct that. I guess my question really goes—and I will be asking Mr. Sancho a question in a minute— 

but regardless, it appears that you are still depending on a paper 

trail to serve a very important function even in the auditing process, because by your testimony a minute ago, it would be the paper 

ballot or the printout from the electronic recording of the vote that 

would basically measure some percentage of the machines, then 

you would feel that you would go forward after meeting that particular threshold. Is that correct? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Yes. And then there is an important, I think, 

distinction, I mean, a recount as we conducted it in the case of the 

15th congressional district election last year was statutorily required function to come up with to basically essentially re-examine 

every ballot that was cast, basically recanvass in the election. 

For us in the previous voluntary audits, those were not mandated by law and didn’t have the force of a canvass or a vote-certifying function. It was an examination of the paper records to determine the veracity and validity of the electronic results, which in 


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the case of the 15th congressional district we found that not one 

vote changed as a result of the examination of the paper trail to 

the electronic. The only votes that changed were during the hand 

tally of and the recount of the optically scanned paper ballots. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. Yes, sir. Absent a paper trail, how would you conduct an audit? In other words, it lends an important tool. The 

paper trail is—I guess what I am really getting at, even if you look 

in Texas in my county, Barrett County, we don’t have a paper trail. 

So if you want to conduct an audit, you are going to have to do it 

absent that threshold test that you have already described so—— 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. And in Franklin County, we had used 

paperless DREs since 1992. In the case of the 15th congressional 

district, both of the candidates had been elected and reelected multiple times for different offices using that paperless system. 

That is, frankly, why I believe in the voter verified paper audit 

trail, and supported it in Ohio in 2004 was that I believed that it 

was important to have a permanent independent record from the 

electronics who audit the electronic—the electronic record. In the 

past, recounts have been conducted simply by rereading the electronic results from the electronic cartridges from the voting machines. So by having this permanent paper record that was voter 

verified independent of the electronic record, we have something to 

audit the electronic record with. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. The other question I think you had posed at the 

outset of your testimony was something what constitutes a vote, 

and I am just thinking in terms of I go in there, I vote, I hit the 

key, whatever, it is registering internally, I am going to be able to 

read it, but it is also printed out but I am going to need both components in order to constitute the vote. Is that correct? The actual 

recording by the machine itself internally, electronically but also 

then the manual printout, the paper trail. 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Under Ohio law, and under, based on my understanding of this legislation, the paper is the official ballot of 

record for purposes of the recount. It is my view that the paper 

record should be used to audit the electronic and that the voter, 

you know, has cast their ballot electronically, they have saw it in 

the electronic, but they saw it on the paper, but as I said, it does 

introduce a new voter intent question that is wildly open to litigation by simply saying the paper is the ballot of record, and giving 

election officials no guidance on whether to count what appears on 

the paper as a jam or what does not appear in the event of a blank 

tape. Those issues—if the paper is going to be used as a ballot of 

record, States must give local election officials guidance on what 

constitutes a vote. It is the same issue we ran into in Florida and 

other jurisdictions with punch cards same issue a lot of jurisdictions wrestle with in optical scan. 

Mr. GONZALEZ. My time is just about up. 

Mr. Sancho, quickly, you said your preference would be the optical scanner where someone actually marks the ballot and then it 

is read electronically and such but you still have that, is that correct? 

Mr. SANCHO. Yes, it is, and I really think that right now it is the 

most auditable kind of election. I sort of come back at this from the 

way of audits. I am—the reason that voter verification even began 


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was the introduction of the touch screen voting machines which 

were not transparent and auditable under any circumstances to 

begin with. 

So the idea was to produce a piece of paper that the voters could 

look at to give them the level of confidence that the machine was, 

in fact, recording that. 

Now the issue is, I like the direction that the Holt bill is discussing in saying that that piece of paper has to be durable. One 

of the reasons that election officials all across the country are just 

not very happy with the current technology is that the thermal 

printers tear and jam. Whether you look at the report emerging out 

of Cuyahoga County in May, where 10 percent, or even leaving that 

jurisdiction aside and going to Charlotte—excuse me, Mecklenburg 

County in North Carolina, where on Election Day, I have—I received their copy of all the Election Day problems. Over 58 percent 

of all of the reported election problems were on that printer. 

The Holt bill says that if you are going to use a paper that comes 

out of a DRE, that has to be durable, it can’t be the these toilet 

paper thermal rolls. In other words, what they have done is they 

have established what needs to be audited and left it to the industry to do that. And I will tell that you in the Senate hearing that 

I was at this week, in Florida, I was approached by my vendor, 

who told me they have new equipment under development designed 

to meet that Holt standard, and I was very, very pleased because 

these thermal papers are awful. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you. And the chairman—ranking member 

of the full committee, Mr. Ehlers. 

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you Madam Chair and, I thank you for holding this hearing. 

I just want to mention, first of all, that we held two hearings on 

this topic last year, and I hope that will continue to be part of the 

record as we review the whole issue. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Certainly. 

Mr. EHLERS. First of all, Mr. Sancho, I am very pleased to meet 

you because I am a physicist, and I have been working on ions 

most of my life. It is really a pleasure to meet one face to face finally. 

Mr. SANCHO. And I am a charged particle. 

Mr. EHLERS. You look like it. 

I have been in this voting business since the early 1970s, and initially not as a candidate, but as working with other elections. I 

have watched with interest the attitudes developing about the bill 

that Mr. Holt has offered. 

I am not opposed to the bill in principle. I am opposed to some 

of the specifics in the bill. I think it is important that we have 

some method of auditing, as both of you said. 

Let me first say precisely what my standard is, to start with, I 

believe that every voter should have complete assurance that the 

vote they cast will be counted accurately and completely. That is 

number one. 

There is a second part here, which I haven’t heard mentioned at 

all, and that is the voter also has to have the assurance that their 

vote is not diluted by others casting fraudulent votes or some manipulation of the votes which introduces fraud. Now, I haven’t 


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heard you mention fraud at all. To me, that is a very important 

factor. When you look back at the history of it, originally everyone 

had paper ballots. But the reason that voting machines were developed and put in metropolitan areas is to avoid fraud because there 

was so much shuffling of the paper. Once you have paper ballots, 

people can hide them, destroy some, ballot boxes can mysteriously 

appear that were overlooked earlier, questionable marks, et cetera. 

So I think it is very important to look at both aspects of that as 

we consider this bill and the problems that arise. 

The other problem is, you both mention optical scan ballots, 

which are used in my home community as well. Again, a paper 

trail, I am adamantly opposed that the Congress would require 

that you absolutely have to take one of the options and say that 

is the official record. I think it should be left to local and State election officials to decide on site which record is more accurate more 

reliable when they make their decisions. 

A good example is during the last presidential election, optical 

scanned ballots were used in Los Angeles County. There were 30— 

over 3,600 ballots cast for President in which voters blackened off 

the ovals for 8 of the 9 candidates and did not blacken that one 

for President Bush. Now, how do you interpret that? Does this 

mean that they were blackening out all the others because they 

wanted to get rid of them but they really wanted to vote for President Bush? Or were they saying, anyone but Bush. In other words, 

I will vote for eight people, but I don’t want to vote for President 

Bush. 

So you can have errors with the paper ballots, too. I don’t know 

how the machine would read them, but the advantage of an electronic machine is that it spots the error immediately and tells the 

voter, you cannot do that. So we have to recognize, it is one of the 

big advantages of electronic machines. 

So I think it would be a bad error to say, well, it is paper and 

paper only that counts. 

I think it is extremely important that we set good standards. One 

or both of you mentioned that. If we are going to go to that system 

I think we have to take the time for the National Institute of 

Standards and Technology to once again set the standards and 

make certain that the firms that check these machines are doing 

it accurately. I think that is a weak link in what we did the last 

time. We did not empower the standards community to watch the 

companies that are testing the equipment. So that is something 

that should be included as well. 

So with that, I don’t have any questions. I really appreciate your 

experience. Much of what you say fits together. Some of you have 

different views on some things but the basic idea is to use an electronic machine, a properly designed one for voting and recording 

the vote. Use some alternative verification. I would like to talk 

about 2 reproducible paths. It could be 2 computers frankly. I know 

computers. I could easily design a system where you have one computer that people vote on. 

You have an alternate computer that looks at the same key 

strokes, analyzes them, records them in a separate fashion, and 

then you can electronically compare the two. Or you can have a 

computer and a paper ballot, whether it is optical scan or a tape 


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or whatever. But absolutely I am unalterably opposed to us in the 

Congress saying we know what is best for you people, and you have 

to use the paper trail as a final one, or you have to use the computer. I think the local officials, who have a much better wisdom 

than the Congress in deciding which one it should be. So I have 

no questions. Thank you very much. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much and, we have my colleague 

from California, Mrs. Davis from San Diego. 

Mrs. DAVIS. I wonder if we can talk about a few of the basics, 

because I don’t quite know this. You mentioned the number of 

hours that were required, just cost generally, how do we look at 

this? This shouldn’t be the biggest factor involved at all, but how 

expensive is it actually to audit and does that end up playing a role 

in terms of what counties do sometimes? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Well, in Franklin County in the recount that 

we did to get just 10 percent of the votes from one Federal contest 

out of, if you look at 2008, we will have 5 Federal contests on our 

ballot, it took us 2,000 person-hours over the course of several days 

to do just that one Federal contest. 

If we were to do all five—and again, depending on the percentage 

that we are auditing to, it would obviously take far more than that. 

The costs for us to prepare and to conduct that—that recount just 

in terms of overtime alone was $50,000 just for that time frame. 

So I view it as a significant cost. If the Federal Government is 

to going to mandate that local jurisdictions on top of their other 

election responsibilities and canvassing and verifying provisional 

ballots and all of the rest to come up with a certified election result, that that poses a significant burden financially on local jurisdictions. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Did you want to comment on that? 

Mr. SANCHO. Again, since we don’t routinely do recounts, and the 

last one we did was 2000, legally, the issue of how many bodies 

that we have to hire, what we did was we brought in—it is after 

the election. We brought in all of our precinct chairmen. So we 

brought in—we had 150 additional people who we have trained 

over the course of several years. And we were able to do our portion of the recount within a day in the presidential election. 

So again, if you are well organized, if—and again Leon County 

is not the size of Cuyahoga, we are 150,000 voters, not a million 

voters—— 

Mrs. DAVIS. I understand. 

Mr. SANCHO. But the issue in Florida is what has it cost us in 

not verifying our elections, and I would want to say you don’t want 

to pay that cost if you are an election official or a voter. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Could you talk a little about absentee ballots and 

how they are integrated into the ballot? 

Mr. SANCHO. They are all optically scanned. And that is one of 

the things—and Congressman Ehlers made an excellent point. You 

are going to have problems with any system. Voter education is top 

of my list of where you must make an expenditure. Voter education 

is how you interact with the citizens and correctly inform of them 

of what the possible pitfalls are and inform them over and over and 

over again how to do this right. If you are not going—if you are 

not willing to put money into voter education, I don’t care what 


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technology you introduce, you are going to introduce problems with 

new technology. 

So voter education has to be considered excellent money spent up 

front. The transition from any technology to another one makes 

that more critical. And that is not where you make shortcuts. 

Mrs. DAVIS. Where you have two technologies, or three in some 

cases, because you have absentee ballots coming in though, is there 

some things as we consider the importance of the audit that should 

be discussed? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. Yes, Congresswoman, and I think, in fact, 

that is why it is so important that many of the provisions that this 

legislation seeks to Federalize are handled at the State level. In 

Ohio, we have 88 different counties. And there are, if I remember 

correctly, three different voting systems and nine different combinations of those voting systems being used in each of the counties, depending on, for instance, our county uses all touch screens 

in the precinct, but by mail, absentee ballots are on optical scanned 

paper ballots. 

So when we are doing those recounts, we have to have separate 

procedures and guidelines on how we conduct each of those recounts or audits. I think—back to your previous question about the 

cost. I think one of the additional costs that this legislation imposes 

is the requirement of using auditors with auditing backgrounds, as 

Mr. Sancho says, he uses poll workers. We used a lot of our staff 

and poll workers as well. None of those individuals have professional auditing backgrounds or experience that would qualify under 

the requirements of this Federal legislation. That would again 

raise the cost of obtaining those people. 

Mrs. DAVIS. This is somewhat controversial, perhaps, but the 

issue of people waiting in line and we all know that certainly plays 

a factor in the ability of people to stand in line with children in 

the rain, and terrible situations happen. 

Is it worthwhile to look at this issue in terms of a time factor? 

Is this just a matter of people you know being negligent about not 

having enough machines for people to use? Where does that issue 

play into this discussion? 

Mr. DAMSCHRODER. I think it is an important issue. But it is one 

that can’t be looked at in a vacuum by just looking at just one of 

many different factors. The length of the ballot, the length of the 

language on the individual issues, all of those play into the part 

of the issue the time it takes. Different States’ requirements, some 

require ID, some don’t. All of these different factors, including the 

number of the extent of the equipment, the number of machines, 

all of those play a factor in the time it takes for an individual from 

the time it takes to park the car to the time they return, I don’t 

think you can—it is an issue that has to be examined, but I don’t 

think it is an issue yet that is ripe for legislation, but I don’t think 

all the facets are properly studied. 

Mr. SANCHO. I have a little different view on this. Coming into 

this as an aggrieved citizen who saw the system melt down my orientation is from the voter’s perspective. We built our precinct voter 

system and technology around a voter never having to wait longer 

than 20 minutes to vote, period. That is the commitment that we 

make to the voters, we built the number of precincts, and the optiVerDate Aug 31 2005 12:49 Jul 26, 2007 Jkt 035804 PO 00000 Frm 00026 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A804.XXX A804

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cal scan voting system actually is a faster voting system than 

using, certainly, an audio-based touch screen. 

And we have successfully, since 1992, been able to carry out that 

have responsibility of nobody waiting more than 20 minutes. And 

when I see lines of citizens waiting four and 5 hours to vote, I am 

outraged. I personally, would like to see it a crime for citizens to 

be turned away from the poll without being allowed to vote. To me, 

my role as the gatekeeper of democracy imposes on my position the 

requirement that I do what I must to ensure that that gate is not 

closed on the voter. 

Ms. LOFGREN. The time has expired, and we have been joined by 

the author of the bill, not a member of the committee, and I would 

ask unanimous consent could to allow Mr. Holt to participate in the 

questioning for as long as he is able to be here. You are next if you 

want to ask a question, Rush. 

Mr. HOLT. I have just one brief comment. As I came in, I heard 

some discussion about auditing. And then I also heard a brief comment about waiting times. With regard to the particular legislation 

that is under consideration here, the idea of an independent board 

to oversee the procedures of the audit, it does not require that they 

all be professional auditors. In fact, election poll workers might 

qualify. It is just that it should be overseen by a person in the 

State who has that independence from the election procedure. And 

that is the point, to establish some measure of independence. 

With regard to waiting time, I would say that is the subject of 

other legislation that I’ve introduced or that others have introduced 

that I think is worthy of consideration, but probably at another 

time. Thank you. 

[The statement of Mr. Holt follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you, and welcome and thanks to this panel. 

We keep the record open for additional questions for 5 days, so 

there may be additional questions to either one of you, and we appreciate so much your taking your time to share your experiences 

with us as we look at this important piece of legislation. So thank 

you very much and we will ask that next panel to come forward. 

Welcome to all of you. I was mentioning earlier as soon as we 

notice a hearing, votes are called so we always start these hearings 

late. So we will ask therefore that you summarize your written 

statements in 5 minutes. When the yellow light goes on, it means 

you have about a minute left to summarize. And your full statements will be made part of the official record. 

I would like to introduce, in order, Candice Hoke, who is a professor, a law professor, a nationally recognized and widely cited expert on constitutional federalism and major Federal regulatory programs in the context of election law. She is a graduate of Yale law 

school, former judicial clerk on U.S. Court of Appeals in the first 

district and a former staff member of the North Carolina governor’s 

office. She leads the center for election integrity as its director and 

had been appointed as a member of the three-person Cuyahoga 

election review panel. 

Mr. Doug Lewis is executive director of the National Association 

of Election Officials. He has been the executive director of the National Association of Election Officials since 1994. Also a 501 C–3 

organization known as the Election Center. He developed the professional education program, extensive training program for elections and registration officials which awards the certified elections 

registration administrators certificate upon completion of the program along with other honors and activities. 

Lawrence Norden is the counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, a think tank and Public Law Institute at New York University 

School of law. He works in the areas of voting technology, voting 

rights and government accountability and is the lead author of several books relating to machines and voting systems. 

He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the NYU 

School of Law. 

Tammy Patrick is a Federal compliance officer of Maricopa County, Arizona elections department, and is responsible for the recent 

expansion of the Maricopa County Elections Voter Assistance and 

Board Worker Enhancement Training Program, which won the National Association of Counties Achievement Award in 2005 and 

2006 and is tasked with ensuring compliance with the Voting 

Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and HAVA. Ms. 

Patrick collaborates with community organizations and voter empowerment groups. 

And finally, Pamela Smith, who is the president of Verified Voter 

and Verified Voting Dot Org, and Verified Voting Foundation. She 

provides information and public testimony on verified voting issues 

on State and local levels and has testified before Maryland’s legislature, California’s Secretary of State’s voting system and procedures panel, the San Diego county board of supervisors among others. She has co-authored written testimony on several voting systems and has made legislative recommendations and reports on accessibility and audibility issues for voting systems and other reVerDate Aug 31 2005 12:49 Jul 26, 2007 Jkt 035804 PO 00000 Frm 00030 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A804.XXX A804

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search, and she has been a small business and marketing consultant for many years originally from Chicago Illinois. She is now a 

resident of Carlsbad, California. 

STATEMENTS OF CANDICE HOKE, DIRECTOR, CLEVELAND 

STATE UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY; R. 

DOUG LEWIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ELECTION OFFICIALS; LAWRENCE NORDEN, COUNSEL, BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE; TAMMY PATRICK, 

FEDERAL COMPLIANCE OFFICER, MARICOPA COUNTY ELECTIONS DEPARTMENT; AND PAMELA SMITH, PRESIDENT, 

VERIFIED VOTER 

Ms. LOFGREN. So welcome to all of you. And if we may begin 

with Ms. Hoke and move forward for all of your statements. 

STATEMENT OF CANDICE HOKE 

Ms. HOKE. Good afternoon, Chairwoman Lofgren, Ranking Member McCarthy and Committee members. Thank you for inviting the 

Center for Election Integrity of Cleveland State University to participate in this hearing on Federal Election Auditing. Since 2006, 

our Center has held the appointment as Public Monitor of Cuyahoga County Election Reform. 

In October, we initiated and obtained Cuyahoga Board of Elections approval to conduct an unprecedented Collaborative Public 

Audit of the November 2006 General Election. This independent 

audit was conducted jointly by the County Democratic party, the 

County Republican party and three election reform organizations. 

Professional auditors were participants in its planning and execution. 

Our Center may be somewhat unusual in that we have been 

guided by a principled commitment to Federalism as the basis of 

our election systems. My own scholarly and consulting background 

prior to undertaking work in election reform focused on the 10th 

Amendment and Supremacy Clause. In the mid-1990s, for instance, 

the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, enlisted me to work on legislation to stem Federal preemption of State law. 

I have not advocated Federal legislation as the solution to all 

electoral administrative problems and don’t believe it alone can 

cure the inadequacies present today. But even as a strong proponent of State powers and Federalism, I would urge that Federal 

election legislation plays a critical, though as yet, underutilized 

role in achieving quality elections throughout the Nations. The 

election system can become a prime example of cooperative Federalism. 

Given the expertise present to discuss election audits today, I 

would like to address only 2 issues in oral testimony: first, the importance of requiring independence of the election auditing structure from the election officials; and secondly, the need to ensure 

that essential administrative duties for achieving valid trustworthy 

Federal election audits will be fulfilled. 

First on independence: to achieve voter confidence that all valid 

ballots were counted and counted accurately, the auditors’ indeVerDate Aug 31 2005 12:49 Jul 26, 2007 Jkt 035804 PO 00000 Frm 00031 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A804.XXX A804

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pendence from the election officials and the system responsible for 

conducting the election is imperative. 

As my written testimony details, independence is critical for a 

number of reasons that have been documented in a variety of studies including the SEC’s own work on auditing. 

Any federally mandated auditing process that does not include 

true independence will waste taxpayers’ time and money and will 

likely retard rather than augment voter confidence. 

Turning to the second recommendation that we made in our written testimony, we would ask that you ensure that the essential administrative tasks for achieving valid trustworthy Federal election 

audits will be fulfilled. In Cuyahoga County, our collaborative audit 

was constructed so that the audit policy decisions and choices of 

races to be audited were invested collectively in the participating 

political parties and advocacy organizations. Our center was to 

identify the audit materials needed and to work with the Cuyahoga 

Board of Elections staff to ensure the logistics and the chain of custody of all needed materials. 

The Board of Election Board Members unanimously approved the 

audit process. We expected staff cooperation and few problems. But 

I was surprised by the number of impediments that were interposed. First, the existing administrative procedures for processing 

Election Day materials upon arrival in the BOE meant that we had 

a difficult time securing the materials in a chain of custody. Second, we discovered software design and electronic election data 

availability issues that we had not anticipated. Third, certain hardware design issues impeded effective audits. And fourth, we found 

to our chagrin and sadness that there was staff nonperformance or 

obstructionist conduct that delayed our audit. 

My written testimony provides details about the first three of 

these types of impediments. I would like to focus on the fourth, 

staff nonperformance or opposition. 

In my experience in Cuyahoga County and elsewhere, I found 

that many election officials approached their jobs with a high commitment to achieving the best possible elections administrative 

record with a verifiably accurate and legal set of results. But unfortunately, there is a ‘‘group 2,’’ or pockets of election officials who 

have enjoyed historically unchecked, broad discretionary authority 

over election performance and over reported election results. Members of this second group tend to disfavor public accountability and 

independent verification of election results, and thus view audits as 

inimical to their interests. 

I see I need to conclude. I would ask that you keep in mind when 

you develop the Federal approach that we need to have a process 

articulated preferably through the States’ Secretary of State or 

their chief election officers that will anticipate various kinds of procedures that need to be in place for effective and expeditious election auditing to occur. A State based system of data collection and 

other procedures must be articulated well in advance of the audits 

which will also include specified consequences for local officials if 

they do not perform. Thank you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you. 

[The statement of Ms. Hoke follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Lewis. 

STATEMENT OF R. DOUG LEWIS 

Mr. LEWIS. I obviously cannot cram 8 pages of testimony into 5 

minutes, so let me just try to summarize as best I can for you all. 

We do a form of audits now. Every jurisdiction in America does 

a form of audits. It is called canvass the vote, and this is one of 

those things that—a whole lot of people who are not involved in 

elections do not understand it, but we go through a process of 

where we actually do try to reconcile all of the numbers and make 

sure that the numbers are what the numbers should be; that we 

go back and look when the numbers do not make sense, and in fact, 

usually whenever there is a problem with an election, it is because 

an election official found that the numbers did not make sense 

somewhere, and then he went back to investigate to find out why. 

In terms of whether or not we ought to have an audit that 

verifies that the equipment is counting correctly, quite frankly, I do 

not think you are going to find that most election officials disagree 

with that. It is how it gets done. It is whether or not what you are 

doing in H.R. 811 actually gets to that and does it in such a prescriptive manner that it really makes it very difficult to do this. 

So I would say to you, as Congressional people, rather than trying to tell us exactly how to do each and every one of these things, 

determine the areas that you want to have policy decisions made 

in, and instruct us to figure out a way to do that. Tell the States 

and the locales what the basic standards are that you want to 

achieve, and then let the laboratory of 7,800 jurisdictions in America go to work. You will find there are several right answers more 

often than not, and I have been on record as saying that having 

an audit that proves that voting systems work is not a bad deal. 

That is a good deal. It is just a matter of how we get there. 

The problem, I think, is that if we get this thing so complicated, 

instead of achieving your goals of higher believability and acceptance of the process, we end up destroying the very thing that you 

are trying to improve, and so let us make sure that we do not get 

to the point that we complicate this so much to the point that nobody has faith in it at all. We are at the point where we have got 

to be careful that we keep beating on the system, alleging that 

somehow the system is wrong when the system works pretty cotton-picking well. It may not work well in the estimation of some 

who are very, very partisan in their viewpoint on this (and that is 

on both sides of the aisle depending on what the issue is) and so 

it is one of those that we have to look at. If you go to the point 

of trying to build escalating audits of all of the Federal races and 

going through counting all of them, you are going to find that humans count far less accurately than equipment does. Every time we 

go into one of these recounts, every time we even do the audits in 

the States that actually do these audits, you find that the real 

problems come from humans, not from the equipment. I mean, we 

do have some equipment problems on occasion, but it is rare when 

compared to the problems that humans make, and so it seems to 

me that where we need to be in this is, do not assume that humans 

are going to be the better answer for this whole process because, 

as election officials, we know after recounts and after audits of 


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doing this, when we find an error, it is usually the humans who 

have made the error and not the equipment. 

In terms of when you look at the costs of all of this, there always 

is a tendency, I think, of any legislative body, that when it wants 

something, it always underestimates the cost of what it is going to 

cost to accomplish the objectives, and it is always easy to shift that 

cost to somebody else that you are not paying for, to always push 

that down to the lowest level and say, well, the jurisdictions can 

pick up that cost. 

The problem with all of this is that we have started to make the 

jurisdictions responsible for all costs and, you must know that they 

are almost at the breaking point in terms of the cost of election 

changes. My concern is this: If Congress begins to assume that it 

knows more about the management of practices of elections and 

that it knows more about what will work than local governments 

do, that it wants to be uniform across the United States, then I 

think democracy is going to be in for a very rough period. 

Secondly, in wrapping this up, let me say to you election officials 

in America are dedicated people. They do this with little money, 

not a whole lot of support most of the time. They get vilified as 

somehow people who are manipulating elections when none of that 

seems to be able to be proven in 99 percent of the cases. It seems 

to me we need to recognize these are good people trying to do a decent and honest job. 

Thank you. 

[The statement of Mr. Lewis follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much for your testimony. 

Mr. Norden. 

STATEMENT OF LAWRENCE NORDEN 

Mr. NORDEN. Thank you. 

Thank you to the subcommittee for holding a hearing on postelection audits, I think a subject that probably would strike most 

people as rather boring but that, in fact, is critical if we are going 

to secure our elections, improve them and restore full public confidence in our electoral system. 

My name is Lawrence Norden, and for 18 months, I was chair 

for the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security. 

This task force included the Nation’s leading computer scientists 

and security professionals, including scientists from the National 

Institute of Standards and Technology, and the former chief security officer of Microsoft and former cyber security czar for President 

George W. Bush. 

What the task force found, I think at this point, is a consensus 

view among security experts and computer scientists who have 

looked at electronic voting machines, and that is that there are serious security and reliability vulnerabilities in these machines. The 

good news is that there is also a substantial consensus on how to 

address these vulnerabilities, and one of the most important 

things, it is agreed, that we can do is to use post-election audits 

to compare voter-verified independent records to the electronic 

tally. Fortunately, this is already happening in many States. As 

the chair mentioned, Connecticut in the last election audited 20 

percent of its precincts that were using optical scan machines. Illinois regularly audits 5 percent of its precincts, and California audits, as many on the subcommittee know, 1 percent of its precincts. 

It has for a long time. In many cases, this is counting up to 200 

races in a single county. Unfortunately, this is not being done in 

most States, and it is the reason why we need Federal legislation 

mandating good post-election audits. What would that look like? 

The Brennan Center has been working with the University of 

California at Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, and with many leading 

election officials and academics to answer that question, and we 

will be issuing a report on that subject shortly. I detail many recommendations in my written testimony. I am going to briefly mention a few of them. 

The first is that it is crucial that the selection process for audits 

be random and transparent, and Cuyahoga County, in 2004, is an 

excellent example of why this is necessary. In 2004, after the general election, election officials were doing a 3-percent post-election 

audit and pre-sorted the ballots to make sure they matched with 

the electronic ballots, so the audits showed that the paper and electronic records matched. But this actually was not a check on the 

system; it did not prove anything. If the process for selecting the 

machines to be audited were public and it were clear to the public 

that the selection was random, this is a problem that could have 

been avoided. 

Secondly, we need to increase scrutiny, audit scrutiny, in close 

elections. In most Federal elections, a 3-percent audit will be sufficient to have confidence that a full recount would not change the 


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results, but in very close races where just the corruption of a few 

votes or a mis-tally could change the outcome of an election, a 3- 

percent audit does not give you, really, any confidence that you will 

have caught an error that might have occurred. To his credit, Congressman Holt introduced this concept in his legislation. 

Third, a good chain of custody is key, and again, the Cuyahoga 

example is a great example for why this is necessary. If poll workers are going to presort ballots or take voting machines home with 

them, we cannot really have much confidence in the audit. 

So, in conclusion, if voter-verified paper records are going to be 

much more than an inconvenience to poll workers and election officials, we really need to use them to check the electronic tally. The 

debate over voting system security is not really a debate over paper 

or what technology we use. It is a debate about increasing public 

confidence in our voting system, and ultimately, good post-election 

audits are what will increase that public confidence. 

[The statement of Mr. Norden follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much, Mr. Norden. 

Ms. Patrick. 

STATEMENT OF TAMMY PATRICK 

Ms. PATRICK. Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank 

you. 

My name is Tammy Patrick. I am the Federal Compliance Officer for the Elections Department in Maricopa County, Arizona. In 

last November’s general election, we conducted a statutory handaudit of 2 percent of the precinct-cast ballots and 1 percent of our 

early ballots in a total of four races that combined both Federal 

and State offices. I refer you to my written testimony for more information on that audit, and I am going to confine my oral remarks 

to three very brief points. 

First of all, a little background. Maricopa County has 1.5 million 

registered voters, 1,142 voting precincts, and about half of our voters vote by mail-in early ballots. At the same time that we were 

conducting this new hand-audit, we also had well over 100 workers 

working from 6:00 in the morning to 12:00 p.m. Midnight, processing our provisional ballots. We had difficulty securing the 144 

individuals who were needed to conduct the hand recount of that 

1 percent of the early ballots and 2 percent of the ballots cast at 

the precinct. We also had additional difficulty keeping them long 

enough to actually finish the audit. I cannot fathom how we would 

conduct a hand-audit of 10 percent of the ballots, especially under 

the requirements of H.R. 811. 

Secondly, it is critical to recognize the limits of a human count. 

For example, our procedures manual, which is written by the Secretary of State, directed audit boards to count ballots in lots of 25. 

We found that, in application, that was too difficult. It seems easy 

enough, but in fact, we had several boards that we had to instruct 

to stack in groups of 10 in order to have the counts come out correctly. Our State law did not expect perfection from the human 

count and recognized an acceptable variation between the handaudit and what was done by the machine tabulation. We could not 

identify and address every discrepancy as required by H.R. 811 

within any realistic time frame. An example of this would be in instances where, in one precinct, the audit board and the electronic 

machine came up with the exact same number of ballots but had 

discrepancy in the total number of votes cast, so the boards were 

not quite understanding in some instances an overvote, for instance, they voted for two when it should have only been for one, 

so they allocated each one of those to two separate candidates. 

Finally, it goes without saying that we cannot conduct a recount 

that includes provisional ballots until we have finished counting 

them. The requirements in H.R. 811 to retain the paper ballots, including those cast on a DRE, in a manner so as not to enable them 

to be tied to a voter, would either preclude any provisional ballot 

from being cast on a DRE or it would immediately impact the ability of the audit’s totals to match reported totals. So, by virtue of 

the parameters set forth in H.R. 811, a successful hand-audit is impossible. Additionally, we could not sort early ballots in with our 

election day ballots, as required by H.R. 811 without compromising 

the inherent security of random order retention. Although we reVerDate Aug 31 2005 12:49 Jul 26, 2007 Jkt 035804 PO 00000 Frm 00232 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6602 E:\HR\OC\A804.XXX A804

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port our results of our early ballots at a precinct level, we tabulate 

and store them in a random, mixed batch as they come in from the 

post office, and that is how we count to preserve both the security 

and the privacy of the voter. So, in our audit, we take those 

batches of 200 and audit them in their entirety as a batch, and we 

would not be able to do that, thus resulting in those ballots being 

handled multiple times. 

We are very fortunate that everyone in this room has a common 

purpose. Whether you are an election official responsible for conducting and tabulating an election, a political observer overseeing 

this process, an elected official whose name appears on the ballot 

or all of us simply as voters ourselves, the outcome of the election 

is that we are all working for the same end, that it is an accurate 

reflection of the will and intent of the people. But the ability to administer an audit and to implement change in response to the 

unique environments within which we all work on our local jurisdictional level is an integral characteristic of success of such an 

audit and must remain at the local level. 

I thank you for the opportunity to testify today, and I look forward to answering any questions. 

[The statement of Ms. Patrick follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. 

Our final witness is Ms. Pamela Smith. 

STATEMENT OF PAMELA SMITH 

Ms. SMITH. Thank you, Chairman Lofgren and Ranking Member 

McCarthy and members of the committee. Thanks for the opportunity to be here and to testify today. 

VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voting Foundation were actually started by a computer scientist. We believe that, if our voting 

systems are reliable and those election officials and the voting public have a way to assure themselves that they are accurate, then 

that will go a long way to increasing public confidence and, therefore, participation in the process. 

We think transparency in elections is so important that we 

launched an election transparency project in 2006 to promote observation of all phases of the election by citizens, including the audits. We think a key purpose of an election audit is to convince the 

losers that they have lost. The winners pretty much always think 

they have won, so that part is easy. I will confine my remarks 

today to talking a little bit about the successes that States have 

seen that are doing audits already and also about costs. 

Not every State has voter-verified paper records that they can 

audit at this time, but of those that do, still only a fraction are 

doing statewide audits. In the ones that are doing statewide audits, 

there have been successes that illustrate that audits can be done 

effectively and cost-effectively, and Congress can help us make our 

elections more transparent and reliable by passing a requirement. 

A great example of what an audit can tell us about a voting system, not just about the accuracy of the outcome but about the system itself, occurred in a place that does not yet require audits. 

Pottawamie County, Iowa, in June of 2006, on the election night 

of the Republican primary, an experienced county election official 

there by the name of Marilyn Jo Drake noticed something odd in 

the vote tallies when the returns were coming in. A popular incumbent seemed to suddenly be losing to an unknown newcomer who 

had scarcely even campaigned. On her own authority, she performed an audit of a single sample precinct to see if the voting machines were counting correctly. They were not. There was a programming error, which meant that votes for candidate A started 

going to candidate B. A full hand-count showed the correct result. 

The machine count was wrong. Suppose both candidates had been 

unknown, neither one an incumbent, nothing to give her the idea 

that something was amiss. A routine audit would still have uncovered the problem. Ms. Drake could have just chosen expediency 

over accuracy. There was no rule requiring her to do this audit. It 

made more work, but it resulted in two important things—the right 

candidate’s being seated in office and the exposure of a glitch in the 

system that could then be repaired or prevented the next time. 

Auditing really means choosing accuracy over expediency. Yes, it 

takes some time. Yes, there is some cost involved, but if it is going 

to be a safety net for voter intent, we have to see it as just one 

step in what it takes to get our elections right. It is no different 

than taking care to program the right names on the ballot or recruiting enough poll workers for election day, and you cannot just 


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do it once in a while. You have to do audits every time. You cannot 

say, ‘‘See, the tallies match every time. Now we do not have to do 

this anymore.’’ that would be a dangerous perspective that fails not 

only to comprehend voting system security but also Murphy’s Law. 

There will be problems at every election. What audits and voterverified paper records do is make those problems solvable. 

To talk about costs just a little bit in the States, there is workload. There is a big difference in what one State is doing compared 

to another, but interestingly, some of the States are actually increasing the amounts that they audit, voluntarily choosing to expand their law or go higher. 

What does this add to the budget? It is far from prohibitive. In 

some cases, the cost is very low, indeed. One of your key costs is 

what you pay the people doing the counting, plus your supervisory 

and planning costs, of course. It takes a time—a big difference in 

time is as variable as the type of ballots you audit. Paper ballots 

are much easier to count than thermal paper rolls. 

What would this look like as a national investment? From what 

we have been able to find out from the States, it just would not 

cost that much, but to compare, take the Washington State gubernatorial recount from 2004. The actual cost total was about 

$900,000. They looked at one race on 2.8 million ballots. It worked 

out to about 31 cents a ballot. If the provisions in H.R. 811 had 

been in effect in 2004, nationwide, we would have audited just 

under 7,000 precincts, and nationwide, we would have checked 

votes from two or three races per ballot, call it 11.5 million votes 

checked. Even at a more conservative rate of, say, 35 cents a ballot, 

it is a little over $4 million. It is not that much. 

What we recommend is for audits to be effective, ensure the selection process is verifiably random; make sure the audit happens 

after all of the ballots have been counted and initial results are in; 

include all of the ballot types, including absentees. You know, I 

wanted to say that, as to absentee ballots, it is important to be able 

to track those for also being able to secure the vote and to secure 

the chain of custody, so whatever we could do to track absentees 

is important. Make sure that officials invite the public in to observe. Do not just allow them in, but actually invite their participation, and they will appreciate that and participate more as time 

goes forward. 

Thank you so much. 

[The statement of Ms. Smith follows:] 


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Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you very much. This is very interesting and 

useful, and as I was listening, I was thinking about the years I 

spent on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors when we 

had elections that we were in charge of, and it always ended up 

that we were the last to be counted, I think, in the State of California because we were so cheap about new equipment, but none 

of us at the time really ever considered that it would be inaccurate. 

It is only as elections have become closer and closer that we realize 

that the technology—you know, that there is no 100 percent, and 

it is something that most of us really were not aware of and that 

we did not focus in on, and really, although when it comes down 

to a recount situation and one side is going to lose, you know, you 

see partisan issues, and it is just a normal part of American life. 

But the fact is, if there is a defect, it can benefit or disadvantage 

either party. So, you know, I am willing to run an election and either win or lose. What I want to make sure of is that the people 

who are making the decisions are the voters, not anyone else, and 

that really gets to the question of these voting machines because 

we cannot see it in the same way, and Mr. Ehlers is right. I mean, 

there is a history. You can defraud the electorate with paper ballots, too, and we know historically there have been times when that 

has happened, and that is wrong, but the concern about the machines is that you would not even know it, and so here is the question. 

Ms. Hoke, you mentioned in the audit—and I am not familiar, 

really, with the audit—that there were software issues, that there 

were hardware problems. Can you briefly describe what those 

issues were and how we could set a standard to avoid something 

like that? 

Ms. HOKE. Yes, Madam Chairman, I would be happy to. 

The software issues—I apologize for my phone. I should have 

turned it off. 

Ms. LOFGREN. It is a beautiful sound. 

Ms. HOKE. It is about to quit. 

The software situation is that we specifically requested, using generic terms, the electronic files that we needed to be able to compare in with the DRE machine totals, meaning the long reports 

from the DRE units and the optical scan totals. Those files were 

not made available to us although I had stayed up 36 hours to 

catch the files at the conclusion of the election. 

So, as it turned out, the IT and Ballot Department managers 

said that the files that we needed did not really exist. After a long 

series of discussions—and we still do not know whether a singular 

file exists, since we do not have access to the Diebold information. 

We ask: what is possible to obtain? What files are created? Were 

there really two usable files that local officials simply did not tell 

us about? Was it that the software does not produce files that make 

it easy to audit? We do not know the answer, but we were told that 

we would need a whole range of files and that we would have to 

take file A and back out the data from file B from file A, and it 

was a complicated series of steps to end up with a number that 

then we could compare against certain precinct totals. 

One of the reasons that we very much need a supervisory authority who has access to the—shall we call it—I do not agree with 


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‘‘proprietary information’’ but, to whatever degree it is, for the authority to be able to study what files should be made available that 

are appropriate for the audit, that mandate at what time during 

the tabulations those files will be saved, and then produced at 

what time. We must have been at the Board of Elections five different times just on a mission to obtain the electronic files. That 

is a problem. 

As far as the hardware, the optical scan devices of at least the 

two major election vendors do not count ballots, optical scan ballots. They only count ballot pages, which means that it is not possible simply by feeding thousands of ballot pages through a scanner 

to know how many ballots have actually been counted. It is a separate step that must be undertaken. It is perhaps a hardware design 

issue plus software issue for us to be able to report accurately how 

many ballots were counted. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Norden, you have been with the Brennan Center for a long time and have looked at these technology issues. Do 

you have recommendations for us to address the kind of issues that 

have just been described? 

Mr. NORDEN. Well, one of the things I would say that would be 

very helpful, particularly in terms of problems with software that 

we have seen, is that there are often problems in aggregating votes 

from a number of machines—and this has occurred several times 

in the aggregation tally software. So one of the things is that there 

are additional kinds of audits that we can do and that many States 

do that will ensure that, number one, we are deterring any kind 

of attacks against the voting system but, more importantly, that we 

are detecting the kind of errors that might cause us to get wrong 

tallies. 

So, for instance, one of the things that they do in California and 

that they do in New York and several other States—Texas—is 

there is a reconciliation process to ensure that we look at the vote 

totals that come out of the precincts from the machines and compare them to the tally server totals, and make sure that what happened at the tally server, the totals of what the tally server are giving us, are correct. That is a check against the software there. 

Another is making sure that the number of voters who signed in 

to vote is relatively close to the number of voters who the machines 

are telling us who voted. In the end, it is unavoidable, given the 

amount of software that these machines run on and the many 

sources that they come from, that we are not going to sometimes 

have problems with the software. The key, I think, is to make sure 

that we are making the appropriate checks and reconciliations that 

are necessary. 

Ms. LOFGREN. My time has expired, so I will turn to Mr. McCarthy. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Well, thank you, Madam Chair. 

This has been a great hearing. I mean, I appreciate all of the 

input everyone has given. 

Doug Lewis, you are the executive director of the National Association of Election Officials. Is that what all of the secretaries of 

state belong to? 

Mr. LEWIS. It is all of the election officials from townships, cities, 

counties, and States. 


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Mr. MCCARTHY. Okay. I was reading your 8-page one here. It is 

very thorough. You are giving us some different ideas. My question 

is: Did you look at this based upon—you wrote a lot of this about 

H.R. 811. Did you look at any timeframe of what that would do to 

the Electoral College? 

Mr. LEWIS. I think it is a legitimate question here. 

The truth of the matter is we saw in election 2000 that the electoral college had to meet before we could actually finish a recount. 

If we are going to add in and layer on an audit procedure that is 

a multiple audit procedure of multiple levels, I think we are really 

looking at some point in another close presidential election that we 

may not be able to actually get to it and get it done by the time 

that the electoral college is going to meet. So it seems to us that 

it is a question that you all have to think about. You have to look 

at this as to what your desires are and also recognize that you then 

make it impossible to get to the point that the public knows who 

won. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Thank you. 

Pam Smith, I was reading yours, too, here. You said, on page 2, 

procedures should be defined governing what to do, in essence, saying that paper should be the final on the audit; is that correct? 

Ms. SMITH. Yes. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Now, were you here earlier for the last panel? 

Ms. SMITH. Yes. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. We had an individual from Ohio who raised a 

very good point where he had the VVPATs, the DREs, and the 

paper did not come out to be the same as the computer; whereas, 

the computer came out with the right number of the number of 

people who voted, but the paper, knowing that we have people who 

are going and feeding the paper who do not do this every day for 

a living, got jammed. And the computer was right, and the paper 

was not, and his opinion was different than yours. I do not know 

if you could give me a little elaboration on yours. 

Ms. SMITH. Sure. 

I think we have to think of this not just in terms of DREs and 

VVPAT-type paper trails but in general. You have a computer 

record that voters never get a chance to see, and you have a paper 

record that they can confirm is accurate. Now, in the case that he 

cited, his very smart poll workers were able to redirect the voters 

so they were voting on the machine so they could check the paper. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. So you would say they were right in what they 

did? 

Ms. SMITH. Yes, that was absolutely right to redirect the voters 

so that they could have an opportunity to check on paper. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. And they were able to do that because the machine showed it? 

Ms. SMITH. In that particular case. In some cases, the machines 

may not tell you, and the voter may not know. They may not have 

been advised that you really should check this paper record because this is the hard-copy record of your vote. Make sure it is accurate. That is something—that notification, I think, is part of 

that, H.R. 811. You need to—if you are expecting voters to use a 

new system they are not familiar with, you have to guide them 

somewhat. 


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Mr. MCCARTHY. Should you mandate one over the other as being 

the final tally? 

Ms. SMITH. Say again? 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Should you mandate paper or the computer to 

be the final tally, one over the other? I mean—— 

Ms. SMITH. I think you can only mandate to be the final arbiter 

of the voter intent the document that a voter has had a chance to 

look at. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Okay. 

Ms. SMITH. If they do not get a chance to look at it, which is true 

about computer bits and bytes in the ether, then they cannot confirm that that is right. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Okay. 

Lawrence, you and Pamela talked about—was it Pamela? No, it 

was Candice. You talked about post-election—is that correct?—that 

voters do not feel that the elections are being held honestly or they 

have questions as to the honesty of the elections; is this right? 

Mr. NORDEN. I think, unfortunately, that there is certainly a 

large segment of the population that—and I think it is incredibly 

corrosive to our democratic system—do not have confidence in the 

results of elections. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Just because my yellow light is on, if you have 

any polling on that, if you could show me—because the executive 

Director of the National Elections cites CNN says 88 percent in the 

last one, but you looked at all of the phrases—I guess Pam did. In 

all of the phrases of auditing, have we ever talked about when we 

are auditing this election on auditing who actually votes? Has anyone brought that up? Because it seems like, okay, we are auditing 

the people who voted, but have we ever checked from the very beginning that the people who did vote were the individuals who 

have the right to vote? If not, would you propose that in legislation 

for identification? Anybody? Yes. 

Ms. HOKE. There is a kind of reconciliation or audit process as 

far as checking to see whether the—at least in Ohio—about the 

number of people who signed in versus the number of votes. There 

have been some additional studies from time to time to ascertain 

whether people did have their IDs checked, and in Cuyahoga County, we did do a further study—I do not have the results on that, 

but I will try to obtain that data for you if you would like. This 

concerned whether people’s IDs were properly checked and, therefore, valid voters. I will try to provide that. 

Mr. MCCARTHY. Because the only thing—I know my time is up. 

If it is true the voters do not believe whether it is true or not, if 

we are going to audit in the end, which in some way we do need 

to have checks and balances, we also need to check and balance 

who actually went there. 

Mr. NORDEN. Well, one point I would like to make, Congressman, 

is that—and a point I tried to make earlier is that, at this point, 

there is near universal agreement among computer scientists and 

security experts about the security vulnerabilities of these machines. 

Mr. NORDEN. I am certainly happy to have the Brennan Center 

come back and talk about allegations of individual voter fraud and 

issues of voter ID, but there are two things I can say about that 


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issue for certain. One of the things we looked at in our security report is that the number of votes that could be affected by problems 

with the voting machines dwarf in comparison to the number of 

votes that could be affected by any kind of retail voter fraud that 

you are talking about. And the second is we do not have that same 

kind of consensus at this point about whether or not there are instances of voter fraud, individual voters who are not entitled to 

vote who are coming to vote. 

Ms. LOFGREN. The time has expired. 

I would note that we have all been handed that report, which we 

will make part of the record. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Now, Mr. Holt, it is your opportunity to ask some 

questions. 

Mr. HOLT. Thank you, Chairwoman Lofgren and Ranking Member McCarthy. Thank you for allowing me to join you. Thank you 

for holding this hearing for the legislation H.R. 811. 

I know there has been a lot of talk about the security and accessibility of equipment and the openness of software and any number 

of other things, but the heart of the legislation is the auditability 

and the use of that auditability, the audit, itself. There are too 

many unresolved irregularities hanging out there that are really 

undermining our belief in our ability to govern ourselves, and as 

I often say to middle school students and others, self-government 

works only if you believe it does. I think there is a lot that has 

shaken that faith that we need to address, and so at the heart of 

the legislation are routine, random, independent audits, and this 

concept, certainly, has been endorsed by many organizations, including some represented here today, and I think the specifics have 

been examined. The specifics have been examined and, in many 

cases, endorsed as well. 

Ms. Hoke or Mr. Lewis, let me ask you: Do you think that the 

proprietary software printout at the end of the day after the polls 

are closed would satisfy your definition or a reasonable person’s 

definition of an ‘‘independent audit’’—and ‘‘independent 

auditability’’—I beg your pardon—and then whether that would, by 

itself, count as an audit? 

Ms. Hoke. 

Ms. HOKE. We took a position in Cuyahoga County that an audit 

would not be sufficient unless independent. Part of the reason—I 

mean, our audit report should be available probably within the 

next 10 days, and you will have some very important data that will 

show that it is important to get underneath the tabulation software’s, shall we say, massage of the numbers to find out what the 

real raw data are. You may find that there are differences between 

the raw data and what is actually reported by the software program. It was our view that it is important to know that. 

Now, it may be that that is a software design problem that could 

be corrected, but certainly, our software engineers who are working 

with our audit felt quite strongly that this is one way to discover 

whether there is rogue code in the tabulation server or in some 

place other than the voting devices themselves that could cause the 

report of the election results not to match the real raw data, and 

so we very much wanted that raw data. And we did do a study of 


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only three races, and we found that there were differences between 

the two election results tables. 

Mr. HOLT. Mr. Lewis. 

Mr. LEWIS. Congressman, I will say to you that there has not 

ever been at this point one verifiable circumstance in which anybody has been able to show that electronic voting has been manipulated. 

Mr. HOLT. That is not what I asked. 

Mr. LEWIS. I understand. 

Mr. HOLT. That is not at all what I asked, because there are very 

many documented unresolved irregularities. I can list 15 counties 

off the top of my head. So, clearly, what I asked is, does a software 

printout at the end of the day constitute auditability, in your mind? 

Mr. LEWIS. If you look at the international standards that are 

created for computer memory in terms of storage—and all of these 

systems have at least a double redundancy and most a triple redundancy in terms of their memory and storage of ballot images 

that are retained within the system meeting the Federal voting 

systems guidelines. If you look at that, those standards are far 

higher than the standards for paper ballots. We can faithfully reproduce the votes as the voters voted them from the Ballot Image 

Retention. We can show you a ballot image of how every voter 

voted. 

Mr. HOLT. Of how every voter voted or—— 

Mr. LEWIS. Ballot image retention is required by Federal voting 

systems guidelines, for all electronic equipment, and so you have 

double and triple redundancy there to where you can pull that out 

there. Yes, sir, I think you can show with great veracity that it is 

exactly what the voter voted. 

Mr. HOLT. I think a key point is your statement that this shows 

how every voter voted, and I think you have missed, if I may say 

with respect, a basic point that every computer interface organization has addressed that the machine cannot verify itself. It is a 

fundamental principle with computer science. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Our time has expired, and indeed, the panel has 

been very helpful, and we thank you for the time invested here 

with us. It is important. We will keep the record open for 5 days. 

We may have additional questions for you, and—yes, sir. 

Mr. LEWIS. I want to clear up, on page 8 of my testimony, a technical—I misstated one number incorrectly. 

Ms. LOFGREN. If you will get it to us, we will make that correction, sir. 

Mr. LEWIS. Okay. Thank you. 

Ms. LOFGREN. Thank you, again, very much for the time you 

have spent and the expertise that you have shared with us. 

The hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 4:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 339 here 35804A.260
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 340 here 35804A.261
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 341 here 35804A.262
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 342 here 35804A.263
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 343 here 35804A.264
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 344 here 35804A.265
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 345 here 35804A.266
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 346 here 35804A.267
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 347 here 35804A.268
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 348 here 35804A.269
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 349 here 35804A.270
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 350 here 35804A.271
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 351 here 35804A.272
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 358 here 35804A.279
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 360 here 35804A.280
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 362 here 35804A.282
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 366 here 35804A.286
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 367 here 35804A.287
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 370 here 35804A.290
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 371 here 35804A.291
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 373 here 35804A.293
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 375 here 35804A.295
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 378 here 35804A.298
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cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARINGInsert graphic folio 379 here 35804A.299
ELECTION REFORM: AUDITING THE VOTE 


cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARING
AUDITING THE VOTE 

ELECTION REFORM: 


cprice-sewell on PROD1PC69 with HEARING