News Release Archive - 2008

ROB RICHIE
Richie is executive director of FairVote and co-author of Every Vote Equal and Whose Votes Count. He said today: “2008 was an historic election in terms of the election of the first African-American to be president and the largest number of voters at the polls in our history. But we have a long way to go to realize the promise of American democracy. In this modern age, there is no excuse for privately-owned voting machines that breed mistrust, confusing ballot designs, polling places with long lines, voter registration laws that leave nearly a third of Americans off the rolls, an Electoral College system that undercuts equality and voting methods that suppress voter choice and stifle fair representation. Amidst yesterday’s candidate races, key ballot measures showed that Americans are ready for change. Landslide majorities voted for instant runoff voting in Memphis, Tennessee, and Telluride, Colorado, early voting in Maryland and 17-year-old primary voting in Connecticut, while independent redistricting won a narrow win in California, and proportional representation barely lost to well-financed opposition in Cincinnati. I believe we will soon have an electoral reform wave reminiscent of the changes a century ago when we won direct election of U.S. senators, women’s suffrage and state changes empowering voters across the nation.”

RICK HASEN
Hasen is the William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law at Loyola Law School. He said today: “The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information. This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

TOVA WANG
Wang is the vice president for research at Common Cause.

WENDY WEISER
Weiser is the deputy director at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

CHRIS KROMM
Kromm is the executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies.

ALEX KEYSSAR
Keyssar is the Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of the book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.
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HARVEY WASSERMAN
Wasserman is co-author of the books What Happened in Ohio? and As Goes Ohio.

RICHARD KIMBALL
Kimball is the president of Project Vote Smart.

SUJATHA JAHAGIRDAR
Jahagirdar is the program director for the New Voters Project of the Student Public Interest Research Group.

PAUL SULLIVAN
Sullivan is the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense.

MATTHEW SEGAL
Segal is the founder and executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment.

MICHAEL ALVAREZ
JONATHAN KATZ
Alvarez and Katz are both professors of political science at Caltech and co-directors of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. They will be available on a conference call on Wednesday morning, Nov. 5 at 11 a.m. ET to discuss voting technology issues.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

SCOTT NOVAKOWSKI
Novakowski is a senior policy analyst with Demos and the author of the recent report “Provisional Ballots: Where to Watch in 2008.” He said today: “When implemented correctly, provisional ballots can enfranchise voters. However, when states adopt unnecessarily stringent standards for counting them and poll workers are not adequately trained in their administration, provisional ballots can have the opposite effect.”

According to the report: “More than one in three of the nearly two million provisional ballots cast in the 2004 election were ultimately rejected. Compared to 2004, fewer provisional ballots were cast and a higher percentage were counted in the 2006 election, yet problems remained. In 2008, continued high rates might exceed the margin of victory in several highly contested states in the November presidential race, possibly resulting in uncertainty on the ultimate outcome and increasing the likelihood of post-election litigation. … The largest percentage of rejected provisional ballots, 43.1 percent in 2006, were invalidated because voters were logged as ‘not registered,’ despite the voter’s belief that they were in fact registered. … Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia categorically reject all provisional ballots [cast in the wrong precinct]. … Where multiple precincts are housed in a single polling place, a voter who merely gets in the wrong line can see her ballot voided. In 2006, 15.4 percent of rejected provisional ballots were thrown out because they were cast in the wrong precinct. … Ohioans cast 127,758 provisional ballots in 2006, the second-highest number in the nation.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

CHRIS STROHM
A reporter for CongressDaily [subscription required] who has been writing about initiatives on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, Strohm said today: “There are initiatives on a wide variety of issues including Michigan Proposal 2, which would repeal a ban and allow government funding of stem-cell research, and Montana Initiative 555, which would give health insurance to all kids in Montana.

“But perhaps the most far-reaching initiatives in this election have to do with energy policy. California Proposition 10, mainly financed by a company owned by Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, would authorize $5 billion in taxpayer bonds to give consumers rebates for buying vehicles that run on alternative fuels, primarily natural gas. Critics say the total cost would be $10 billion with interest. The initiative has heavy opposition from environmental groups to business associations. They say it’s a giveaway to Pickens’ company, Clean Energy Fuels Corp., and would actually be a setback for alternative fuels.

“Similarly, California Proposition 7 would require all utilities, including government-owned utilities, to generate 20 percent of their power from renewable energy by 2010, 40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent by 2025. It has heavy opposition from environmental, labor and business groups, who say it is so poorly written that it could in fact be a major setback.

“In contrast, Missouri Proposition C would require utility companies to gradually increase their usage of renewable energy annually until 15 percent of the energy used in the state is renewable. Advocates say the campaign for Proposition C, unlike California Proposition 7, was organized in a very inclusive manner and therefore has not generated much opposition. It is expected to pass and advance the cause for renewable energy.”

For further information on initiatives, see: ballotpedia.org.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

PENNY VENETIS
Venetis is plantiff’s counsel in a four-year lawsuit spearheaded by the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers School of Law. According to expert reports conducted as a part of the lawsuit, “approximately 10,000 voting machines used in 18 out of the 21 counties in New Jersey can be manipulated to throw an election.” The report concluded that “vote-stealing software can be easily installed in the AVC Advantage [Sequoia electronic voting machines] in less than eight minutes. The technical knowledge needed to write vote-stealing software is widespread and common.”

Venetis said today: “The possibility for disenfranchisement due to voting machine insecurities puts at risk the more than 5 million registered New Jersey voters. It is most unfortunate that the state continues to defend these insecure voting systems.”
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DAVID JEFFERSON
Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. He has also served as a technical advisor to five Secretaries of State of California on issues related to elections and voting, and has led or participated in several formal studies of voting system reliability and security. He said today: “The most important property that a voting system can have is meaningful and transparent auditability. We must not depend on the reliability of hardware or the correctness of software. Even if the voting system is proprietary and is riddled with bugs, security vulnerabilities, or even malicious code, we must be able to demonstrate we can detect the problem and call the winners properly anyway, and do so in such a way that even the losing candidates will be convinced of the correctness of the outcome. Today this is only practically achievable with scanned paper ballots (or to a lesser extent, a voter-verified paper audit trail) accompanied by a mandatory, statistically sound, risk-based post-election audit procedure.”
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MICHAEL ALVAREZ
JONATHAN KATZ
Alvarez and Katz are both professors of political science at Caltech. They are also co-directors of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

MARJORIE COHN
Cohn is the president of the National Lawyers Guild, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law. She recently wrote the piece “A Palin Theocracy.”

Cohn said today: “The next president will almost certainly appoint one to three justices to the Supreme Court, which is now delicately balanced politically. The most likely justices to retire are John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter. John McCain, who voted to confirm Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, has vowed to appoint more justices like Roberts and Alito to the high court. One McCain appointee would tip the balance of the Court to the right which would likely overturn Roe v. Wade and decisions protecting the rights of workers and the environment, and decisions curbing the power of the executive. Barack Obama voted against the confirmation of Roberts and Alito, and has promised to appoint justices like Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Even if Obama made three appointments, he would not tip the political balance of the Court to the left, but would maintain the status quo since he would likely be replacing the ‘liberals.'”
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BRUCE FEIN
Author of the new book Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy, Fein said today: “It’s disgraceful that core constitutional questions have been virtually ignored in this election. Neither McCain nor Obama have indicated that they will move to a constitutional government and away from executive government.

“They have both said they would close Guantanamo, but that’s really meaningless since they both assert the right to hold so-called ‘enemy combatants’ without charge, so they could simply move the people being detained to another facility.

“Both maintain that the executive can initiate war. Both — like Bush now — have said that they would not allow further waterboarding and that it is torture, but neither has said that they would prosecute the conceded waterboarding of the Bush administration. Likewise, neither has said they would prosecute members of the current administration for other criminal conduct, such as well-known criminal violations of the FISA statute. Neither Obama nor McCain has disclaimed the authority claimed by Bush to order current or former White House officials to defy congressional subpoena.”

Fein recently wrote the piece “Palin vs. Palin.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

DAN WALLACH
Wallach is an associate professor at Rice University and also the associate director of the National Science Foundation’s ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections), a $7.5 million research effort across six different institutions to improve U.S. election systems. He said today: “Present-day electronic voting systems have a variety of security flaws, many of which you have heard about. Of course, we can find problems with any voting system, but the present-day electronic systems enable fraud of a scale and simplicity previously unknown in the administration of elections.”

Wallach added: “Our work [reviewing electronic voting systems in California] found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of ‘viral’ attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. In effect, one attacker, corrupting one machine, could arrange for every voting system in the county to be corrupt in the subsequent election.”
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PAMELA SMITH
Smith is president of the Verified Voting Foundation and its sister advocacy organization VerifiedVoting.org. She said today: “Voters should be able to check that their votes were recorded accurately; election officials should be able to prove that votes were counted correctly. Post-election audits of voter-verified paper ballots are the best way to make sure voting systems are working as they should — a potent safeguard on our election process.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

BBC reports: “Syria has protested angrily to both the U.S. and Iraq after what it said was a U.S. helicopter raid inside its territory that killed eight civilians. Syria summoned U.S. and Iraqi envoys to condemn the ‘aggressive act.’ Iraq said the area targeted was used by militants to launch cross-border attacks in Iraq.”

JOSHUA LANDIS
Landis is co-director of the Center for Middle East Studies and assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. He writes the blog “Syria Comment,” which contains up-to-date information including videos. He said today: “A big question is why now. Syria has been improving border compliance steadily. General Petraeus announced this month that Syria has brought down infiltration from 100 to 20 a month.”

RICHARD FALK
Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and currently visiting professor at Chapman Law School. He is the author of more than 20 books including The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order after Iraq.

He said today: “The U.S. helicopter cross-border raid against a Syrian target is the latest display of Washington’s disregard for the restraints of international law on the use of force, as well as exhibiting a refusal to respect the territorial sovereignty of Third World countries. It is also a typically reckless expansion of the regional war zone, and taken together with similar recent American air and missile cross-border attacks on Pakistani targets represents a provocative and dangerous escalation of the so-called ‘war on terror’ somewhat suspiciously taking place on the eve of the American presidential elections.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The lead piece in the Washington Post today is “Greenspan Says he was Wrong on Regulation.” (The piece is critiqued by economist Dean Baker, who continuously warned of the ramifications of the housing bubble since early in this decade.)

ROBERT AUERBACH
Professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Auerbach wrote the new book Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank. Auerbach was an economist with the House Committee on Financial Services including during a period when Texas Congressman Gonzalez attempted to achieve a level of meaningful oversight over the Fed. Gonzalez was continuously thwarted by Greenspan.

Auerbach said today: “Yesterday, Alan Greenspan’s testimony contained the same type of dodges that the master of garblements had displayed in the 1990s when he achieved saint-like status as leader of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan’s response to questions about the causes of the current economic crisis included the unreliability of predictions and the failure to regulate one particular financial derivative. That narrowing of causes hides his dismal record on regulation.

“Greenspan had already been through a financial crisis and should have known exactly why better regulation was needed. Greenspan fought House Financial Services Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez, who pushed for needed regulation that was plainly illustrated after the savings and loan/banking crisis that ended in the early 1990s.

“The Clinton administration called for a rational bank regulatory system by consolidating the bank regulators into one agency. Greenspan railed against the idea and talked about the need for ‘hands-on regulation’ by the Fed. Gonzalez replied that Greenspan failed to tell us where the Fed really has its hands and that the only hands that should be on Federal Bank regulation are those of a neutral bank regulator. Since two-thirds of the nine directors at each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks are elected by the banks in their district, there are profound conflicts of interest with bankers regulating themselves.

“In his 2007 book, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan changed his mind and said that ‘hands-on supervision and regulation’ is ‘being swamped.’ That was last year when he wrote ‘We have no sensible choice other than to let markets work.’ Yesterday he testified he was wrong about his hands-off regulatory philosophy. The 2007 hands-off regulatory philosophy was a change from his previous hands-on regulatory stance. This is not philosophy. It is the ‘master of garblements,’ the title of Chapter 3 in my book Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

JOHN BONIFAZ
A coalition of Pennsylvania voters and civil rights groups, led by the NAACP State Conference of Pennsylvania, yesterday filed a lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia seeking to ensure that voters receive emergency paper ballots on Election Day when 50 percent or more voting machines become inoperable at any polling site in the state.

Bonifaz is the legal director for Voter Action and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. He said today: “Voters should not be forced to wait hours in line in order to exercise their fundamental right to vote. While the use of electronic voting machines continues to pose a separate threat to the integrity of the vote-counting process, federal court intervention is necessary to ensure that voters will not be disenfranchised by long lines on Election Day when these machines become inoperable.”

KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY
Gray is the author of the forthcoming book Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics. He said today: “ACORN is McCain’s ‘Willie Horton’ of sorts. The aim of the attack is to suppress the vote by raising questions on the ‘legitimacy’ or ‘legality’ of some of those potential Obama voters registered by the non-profit group. And just maybe some of those registered by ACORN will be intimidated into not coming to the polls for fear their registration will be challenged.”

Gray added: “This Election Day, voters should prepare themselves for standing in a line for an hour or more and be prepared to be told they can’t vote because their name was removed from the voting roll. Voter purging has long been a weapon used to blunt black voter turnout. Election officials regularly remove voters’ names from the rolls as they update and improve their lists. According to The Brennan Center, between 2004 and 2006, 39 states and the District of Columbia purged some 13 million voters while cleaning up the rolls.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167