Oregon SoS Bill Bradbury's Speech to OR Assn. of Counties Nov. 2005

Link: http://www.sos.state.or.us/executive/speeches/111705.htm

Secretary of State Bill Bradbury

Oregon Association of Counties

Eugene
November 17, 2005

Good morning!

We are now six years past the presidential election that brought elections administration to the forefront of the political agenda. We are now four years into implementation of the single largest federal election reform effort in history, known, of course, as the Help America Vote Act. And the most important deadlines of that federal law loom just around the corner.

I'm proud to say that Oregon is on time and on budget to meet the federal deadlines for centralized voter registration and ensuring that voters with disabilities can vote privately and independently. These are both huge projects and I encourage you, if you haven't done so already, to take a look at what your county is doing to comply with federal law.

Our centralized voter registration system is live and functioning in 35 of the 36 counties (and in case you're wondering, Marion County is number 36). With this new centralized system, our voter rolls are cleaner, more accurate, easier to track and more accessible to the public. The insight and expertise of county clerks has been instrumental in building the best new centralized voter registration system for our state, and I'm thrilled to see all of our hard work coming to fruition.

It has NOT been easy. Congress had no idea what a difficult thing they were imposing when they wrote a law requiring each state to build a new voter registration system, combine all the local voter data into one system, deliver it to every county, make it secure and try to keep future maintenance costs at tolerable levels.

In fact, it's been downright painful for us and for many of your county elections offices to get this job done. And frankly, the pain is likely to continue into the future as we work to perfect the system. But working together, slowly and surely, we have built an Oregon system that is compliant with federal law and will serve all of us well for years to come.

As many of you know, these large systems are always a work in progress. We are creating a board of advisors with plenty of county representation to monitor the system. And, we're setting aside $10 million, nearly a third of our federal HAVA allocation, into a sustainability fund to ensure that the system does not become a financial burden on any of us.

This commitment of funds to offset ongoing costs is simply not happening anywhere else in the nation. Here is how the fund will work: we will take the interest that we earn off the $10 million, deduct it from the total maintenance costs of the system, and then we'll divide the remaining maintenance costs by two.
The counties will collectively be responsible for half of the remainder and my office will be responsible for half. We have been partners in developing this system and we are going to be partners in sharing the benefits of the sustainability fund.

The other important HAVA deadline concerns voters with disabilities. Between 20 and 25% of Oregon's population has a disability, and each disabled voter deserves to vote with the same privacy and independence as everyone else. Because I am a voter with a disability, this is a subject that is very important to me.

But for everyone of my generation-and as I look around the room I see a few others with retreating hair lines and advancing waist lines-we aging baby boomers are all starting to deal with the need for greater accommodations. Frankly, for more and more of us, things like large print ballots sound pretty good.

Many voters with disabilities have complained for years that they didn't get to cast a private ballot because they needed assistance marking it, but now technology can make that assistance unnecessary.

My friend Jim Dickson, who works for the American Association of People with Disabilities, is blind and about my age. Last year, Jim was able to vote by himself for the first time in his life. Think about that for a minute. The secret ballot, something I consider sacred, was unavailable to a large segment of the population until now.

We worked closely with the Oregon disability community to find the right voting technology. We used federal funds to hold a fair at the Capitol, which brought more than 100 Oregonians with disabilities to Salem to test the equipment that vendors now offer to improve disabled access. Collected feedback told us which systems voters prefer. And I have to tell you, it was a pretty amazing sight that day, to have a wheelchair traffic jam in the Capitol.

The machine that won the contract for Oregon, the ES&S Automark, is a touch screen machine that fills in a standard optical scan ballot for the voter. So not only is a disabled voter able to vote with the privacy and independence of all other voters, but the disabled voter's ballot looks like and is treated like all other voters' ballots. For the first time in our history, all voters will be treated equally, regardless of their ability or disability.

But again, there is a huge job ahead for your county elections offices. Before the end of the year they will be receiving the Automarks. Your county will assume ownership of the machines. Your county election officials will be trained on how to program the machines, test them, and care for them long term. And they need to be ready to put these machines to use in the May 2006 primary election.

We have, in the four years since the passage of the Help America Vote Act, made major progress towards an elections administration system that is cleaner and more consistent. But elections administration has not dropped off the public radar. If anything, the public is now more concerned than ever about elections, and their demands are growing louder and more sophisticated.

We cannot simply react and play defense against a rising tide of legitimate public questions and concerns. Elections are the foundation of democracy, and our democracy cannot function without full public confidence in the fairness of elections. We must proactively offer the public an elections system that is clean, transparent, fair, and above reproach. We must be able to prove that all of our claims about elections are true.

My office has been receiving more and more communications from people in Oregon who believe that counties aren't doing enough to assure the public that vote tally machines aren't rigged and are counting votes accurately. Some are convinced that it's possible to pre-program these machines to manipulate the outcome of elections far into the future. The voices of these people are growing louder and louder.

Two years ago, I heard just a few these same voices, and we started to discuss the issue with county clerks. My office argued that we ought to reinstate post-election administrative recounts - a process where counties would do a hand recount of a small percentage of ballots in order to provide extra proof that the tally machines worked correctly. This would be in addition to the routine logic and accuracy tests that counties are already required to perform.

But the county clerks opposed doing this extra test. So we compromised with a rule allowing either my office or the county clerk to call for an administrative recount if there is evidence suggesting a problem with the ballot counting machines.

At the time, that compromise was sufficient to satisfy elections officials, but it has not been sufficient to satisfy the public. Some of your county clerks are now hearing more frequent calls for validation of election results.

We are seeing proposals that are costly and complicated to prove that an election is as accurate as we say it is. I believe we are faced with a compelling public demand to do more than we're now doing to verify election results.

We cannot ignore our constituents. It's not enough anymore to simply tell them "just trust us."

We need to revisit our compromise, and look again at the best way to validate election results. Administrative recounts of selected precincts to verify election results would not only be appreciated by the public, it would also improve elections administration by allowing us to identify and fix systemic problems in vote counting before certification of the results.

We don't believe that there are systemic problems in vote counting, but we don't have the procedures to prove it. We believe that our elections are accurate, but we need hard evidence to show the public.

We have made significant improvements in elections administration over the past four years, but we can and we will do more.

Regular administrative recounts after every election will help restore public confidence in our elections and our democracy. Regular administrative recounts will help assure the public that our elections are fair, and the election results are valid. Regular administrative recounts tell our constituents that we are listening and that we are doing everything we can to address their concerns.

Oregonians deserve nothing less.