[EL] EAC-FVAP Re: ELB News and Commentary 10/21/11

[Candice Hoke]

Hidden among the weeds of this useful discussion on military voter data collected by the EAC & DOD's FVAP, a critical set of election policy decisions lurk that need to be faced directly instead of suffering collateral damage or summary disposition.  

Betwixt the weeds:  

— Will there continue to be a bi-partisan, highly transparent Federal election agency that is charged not with regulatory power but rather to offer best practices and support for improved State and local election administrative operations?  

— Will we continue to have the outstanding scientists at NIST and from premier academic institutions working with election officials to generate voting technology standards  and a qualified testing apparatus, or will the private sector voting system vendors have the ability to market systems as "accurate" and "secure" with no testing that can validate or negate those claims?  (Most States have chosen to rely on the "voluntary" Federal certification system to some degree, and their laws have been written in reliance on this Federal effort.)

— Will we lose the national capacity to leverage at low fiscal costs State and local election officials' expertise along with legal, think tank/nonprofit and computer scientists' understandings, in a structure dedicated to protecting voting rights of all Americans, no matter their Party, residence, or persuasion?

— Will an obscure DOD agency (the FVAP) that structurally lacks transparency, the range and depth of expertise, bipartisan involvement, and understanding of election law and electoral values found in the other agency (the EAC) be permitted to dominate federal efforts in improving/supporting elections values despite its decade-long record of highly problematic decision making and focus on a tiny fraction of voters?

Like many other election lawyers with election administrative expertise, I have been a critic of the EAC.  But structurally the EAC is head and shoulders above the FVAP;  it needs reform rather than extinction.  Good fiscal management would result in legislatively stripping the FVAP of power to develop and fund voting technologies independent of the EAC-NIST structure.  Arguably, too, FVAP should not be permitted to conduct duplicative studies of UOCAVA voting, given its decade GAO-documented poor data collection/analysis practices and fiscal wastefulness.  

I would urge Members of Congress and their staff to recognize that a bi-partisan transparent agency that structurally is compelled to work with a variety of stakeholders and levels of government, and that has developed significant depth and expertise in election technologies is a public investment not to be lost on the spurious grounds of fiscal belt-tightening.  We need to put heads together to build a responsible Federal electoral presence (not dominance), revising both the FVAP's and EAC's powers to deal effectively with the challenges election administration faces today & into the near future.

More detailed analysis & recommendations can be found in the ABA's  America Votes! anthology on election law (Benjamin Griffith, ed. 2d ed. expected pub. early 2012), in the voting technology chapter.  Or contact me.



Professor Candice Hoke
Law School
Cleveland State University
216 687-2313

shoke at law.csuohio.edu

Disclaimer:  Any opinions I may have expressed are my own and do not reflect the positions of any university, State or Federal institutions, boards, or committees with which I may be affiliated, although I may wish that they did.






On Oct 21, 2011, at 12:36 AM, Rick Hasen wrote:

> Eversole Responds on Discrepancy in Military Voter Turnout Data, Questions FVAP data.
> 
> Posted on October 20, 2011 9:26 pm by Rick Hasen
> Following up on this post, I received the following response via email from Eric Eversole, who is the Executive Director of the Military Voter Protection Project and Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at Chapman University. It raises questions about the accuracy of the FVAP data.  (Of course, I would be very interested in posting any response from FVAP).
> 

Professor Candice Hoke
Law School
Cleveland State University
216 687-2313

shoke at law.csuohio.edu

Disclaimer:  Any opinions I may have expressed are my own and do not reflect the positions of any university, State or Federal institutions, boards, or committees with which I may be affiliated, although I may wish that they did.


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