Essential Estrogen

A spokesman in Congressman Tom Latham's office says the lawmaker voted against incentives for election verification because the bill would be a "costly redundant federal program."

The Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008 (HR 5036) encourages states to conduct verifiable elections by converting to a paper ballot system, offering emergency paper ballots, and conducting hand-counted audits. Two weeks ago, the legislation passed the House Administration Committee with unanimous and bipartisan support.

"Congressman Latham believes it is important to ensure the integrity and accuracy of our nation's election process," said spokesman Fritz Chaleff. "To accomplish this, he also supports the concept of providing voters with verification of their ballot choices. To that end, he applauds the State of Iowa for already addressing this by enacting legislation on April 1, which provides uniform voting technology to all 99 counties in the state that will make available voter-marked paper ballots that could be recounted by hand if necessary."

The state legislation that Chaleff cites requires Iowa's county auditors to replace existing touchscreen voting machines with systems that use a paper ballot. The federal legislation that Latham and Congressman Steve King -- Iowa's two Republican Congressmen -- voted against this week would have provided reimbursement to the state for the cost of replacing the touchscreens.

"This bill would represent a real step forward in our effort to protect the accuracy, integrity and security of the November elections," said Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat and one of the bill sponsors. "The bill that the House leadership scheduled for a vote today is the same one that passed two weeks ago without the objection of a single committee member. There is no reason why this should be a partisan issue, but the Republicans evidently have chose to make it so. The White House issued a statement opposing the bill and 176 of 203 Republicans voted that way."

Chaleff contends the objection to the proposed legislation centered around cost and redundancy.

"Congressman Latham also believes in the importance of protecting Iowa taxpayers' wallets from costly, redundant federal programs," Chaleff said. "HR 5036 creates a new federal program that is redundant with an already existing law -- the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was signed into law in 2002. Among other reforms, HAVA set minimum requirements for voting systems used in federal elections, created a new federal agency to assist in the administration of federal elections, and authorized billions of dollars in election-related grants to states to upgrade their voting systems. To date, approximately $3 billion in federal grants have already been provided to states to upgrade their voting systems. And, the fund still contains more than $1 billion in unspent funds, which remain available to states. Creating a new and redundant federal program at an additional cost to taxpayers of over a half a billion dollars (CBO scoring sets the bill’s price tag at $685 million for fiscal year 2009) is a reckless use of taxpayer dollars."

Holt noted that many of the Republicans -- even those who had previously approved the measure in committee -- cited cost as their primary reason for voting against the proposed legislation.

"I'd like to ask the opponents how much spending is too much to have verifiable elections in the United States," Holt said. "I note that many people who opposed this legislation supported spending almost $330 million in recent years to provide election assistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I would have hoped those who supported efforts to export democracy abroad would be equally committed to strengthening democracy here at home."

Congressman King and his staff have yet to answer the media inquiry that was sent Wednesday morning in relation to this bill.