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The State of Progress on Implementation of Help America Vote Act (HAVA)
The 2002 passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was designed to correct problems in the administration of American elections. However, as the January 1, 2006 deadline for state implementation of many of the bill's provisions came and went, change was not as comprehensive as HAVA's authors had envisioned. Nearly half of states missed one or more HAVA deadlines. For many advocates of election reform, the question is - has HAVA made our election system better or worse? If it maintains the potential for positive reform, what role can nonprofits play in making HAVA successful?
Voting systems and equipment:
HAVA Regulation:
Status of Compliance: Many states have failed to meet the compliance deadline for their voting systems. Concerns over punch cards and lever voting machines have given way to concerns about their replacements. Paperless electronic voting machines — including those deployed statewide in Georgia and Maryland, and in large parts of Florida — were initially seen as the natural replacement for the older voting technology, but concerns have arisen about their reliability, security, and accuracy.
Today, 25 states have laws either requiring voter-verified paper audit trails or use of paper ballot-based voting systems. The use of hybrid systems — which use an electronic interface to produce a paper ballots — has also expanded over the past year, although complaints are being raised by disability groups.
Provisional Voting:
HAVA Regulation: Any person who claims to be registered to vote in a federal election but is not on the official voter registration list or is otherwise thought to be ineligible to vote (for example, has forgotten proper identification) must be offered and allowed to cast a provisional ballot. If eligibility can be verified, the vote is to be counted; if not, the reason why must be specified and available to the person casting the ballot through a website or toll-free number.Status of Compliance: HAVA-mandated provisional ballots were first used in a federal election in November 2004. That year, 1.9 million provisional ballots were cast nationwide, and more than 1.2 million were counted. States have taken different approaches to implementing the provisional voting requirement:
- In 27 states, provisional ballots are eligible to be counted only if cast in the correct precinct;
- In 17 states, provisional ballots are eligible to be counted if cast in the correct jurisdiction.
Voter Identification:
HAVA Regulation: All first-time voters who register by mail but do not include verification of their identification with their registration application may be required to show one of a number of forms of ID at their polling places. This provision required the passage of compliance legislation by each state, placing the larger issue of voter ID on the table even in states long resistant to such requirements.Status of Compliance: The number of states requiring all voters to show ID doubled from 11 in 2000 to 22 in 2006, with legislation currently pending in Mississippi and Ohio. Indiana and Georgia passed the country’s most stringent voter ID laws in 2005, requiring all voters to show a state or federally-issued photo ID before casting ballots. The Georgia law was successfully challenged in court on grounds that it discriminated against minorities and low-income residents. A national commission on election reform headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended universal voter ID.
Voter databases:
HAVA Regulation: Every state must implement and maintain an official, centralized, electronic voter registration list that contains the name and registration information of every legally registered voter in the state and assigns a unique identifier to every legally registered voter. The database must be accessible to all election officials in the state and must be able to interact with the databases of other state agencies, including the motor vehicle authority. The deadline for database implementation was January 1, 2006.Status of Compliance: Creation and maintenance of these databases has proven to be the most costly and complex of HAVA’s requirements, and by the January 2006 deadline, over 20% of states remained noncompliant. Because HAVA did not mandate a specific approach, the resulting databases are substantively different across states:
- 38 states built ‘top-down’ databases, where a unified list is maintained by the state with information supplied by localities.
- 7 states built ‘bottom-up’ lists, where local jurisdictions maintain distinct voter lists and submit information to a state compilation database at regular — often daily — intervals.
- As of January 2006, New York had not started building its database. North Dakota is exempt because it does not require voter registration.
New research released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law suggests that improper administration of these voter databases could result in millions of eligible voters being denied access to the rolls. Using DMV and Social Security Administration databases to verify voter registration information could create hurdles to registration, and in at least seven states, could result in 20% of eligible voters being incorrectly left off. A 2004 audit by the New York City Board of Elections found that 1 in 5 new voter registration records failed to match the state motor vehicle database because of typos by election officials. States must enact policies that account for the wide variety of common database matching errors and ensure that the match process does not bar registration of an eligible voter.