Hearing on the voting bills

On Tuesday, the OAW delegation attended hearings on the voting legislation that we are here promoting this week. The hearing was entitled “Military and Overseas Voting: Problems and Progress in Ensuring the Vote.” Since I mentioned it on the blog, I know that some of you were watching via the live feed on the Committee on House Administration website and even saw the OAW delegation in attendance.

Since my friend Eric Way and I were seated almost directly behind the witnesses’ seats, I hope that as you watched, you noticed two well-dressed, attentive witness-watchers in action – both of us taking notes on our laptops all the while. If so, that’s us. If you saw two guys periodically nodding off, those were the staffers across the aisle from us.

Here are some of the highlights from the hearing:

Congressman Brady chaired the hearing and took testimony from Congressman McCarthy, Congresswoman Maloney, a guy named Mr. Dominguez representing the military (essentially representing the Federal Voting Assistance Program, FVAP), Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman, Kimball Brace (President of Election Data Service, Inc.) and then finally Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat (President and CEO of the Overseas Vote Foundation).

These witnesses were generally helpful and interesting, but two stand out in front of all of the rest – Congresswoman Maloney and Susan D-S of OVF. I think it is fair to say that these two women are the Queens of Overseas Voting – our Patron Saints of Democracy in Action. They should each have one of those titles on their business cards. Congresswoman Maloney fulfills her saintly duties from within the walls of the Capitol and Susan does so from the outside, banging on those walls from afar.

Maloney, a Democrat from New York and the chair of our beloved Americans Abroad Caucus, does not mince words. She kicked off her testimony by describing the legislation that she has introduced, then saying that she fears that her work will be “in vain” because of “the incompetence of the Federal Voting Assistance Program.” Congresswoman Maloney then described the Americans Abroad Caucus, which she said that she founded last year with Joe Wilson to “give these individuals a voice in Congress.”

On voting, she said that as many as 2/3rd of overseas votes aren’t counted and that these “errors result from the practical complexity of the system.” Her bill will make changes that ensure that our votes are counted. One example: states would be prohibited from rejecting ballots printed out off of the internet, one method often used by overseas Americans who do not receive their hard-copy ballots in time. The bill also extends voting rights to young American citizens living overseas, who often cannot vote without moving back to the United States.

Some of my favorite quotes from the hearing:

As a witness finished her testimony, the Chairman said, “I would like to thank the gentlelady” for her testimony. Gentlelady must be a Capitol Hill-only bit of vocabulary because I’ve never heard that anywhere but here.

Then Beth Chapman, the Alabama Secretary of State and member of the National Association of Secretaries of State, summed up her testimony as follows: “Robots sweep and vacuum our floors,” so these voting problems are “a travesty of justice.” Robots don’t sweep and vacuum my floors, but I agree with the rest.

She then made another juicy analogy, telling us that the purpose of one of the voting bills, H.R. 5673, is to do careful surgery on the existing voting system, which then morphed into disgusting imagery about perilous and bloody medical intervention. We almost forgot she was talking about voting. If I were on the committee, I would have voted for H.R. 5673 right then, just to clean up the operating room imagery unfolding in the hearing room. You don’t want to soil nice carpet like that.

Secretary of State Chapman at one point mentioned that registering to vote as an overseas American can take as much as 42 days, which she helpfully noted for us “is a month and a half.” I have doubled-checked this and determined that her calculation isn’t off by much; so much for all the jokes about education in Alabama.

Rep. Ehlers suggested that if the military can’t keep track of its personnel who want to vote, then “you might just want to give each of them a FedEx box” because FedEx and other similar companies keep track of 23 million packages a day around the world and could certainly handle voting ballots. I pictured the local FedEx delivery guy driving his truck onto an Iraqi battlefield to pick up ballots and wondered how that would work, but according to Susan D-S, they might soon be doing that - as a public service, no less - specifics to be announced soon by FedEx and OVF.

Representative Lungren chimed in on the delivery issue, noting that it “isn’t rocket science” to get FedEx to deliver ballots; also, rocket science would be handled by another committee.

Oh and for the record, in a Congressional hearing, the phrase “I would like to state for the record that…” actually literally means something.

Any overall conclusions come out of the hearing? No, not really. A lot of interesting ideas were tossed around and a number of favorable comments were made about the various pieces of legislation under consideration. But no decision was taken or concrete process laid out. I left with the impression that things will not be moving at the tempo necessary to get things done in time for the 2008 election. But you never know. We will have to stay tuned and continue to press our message of voting reform long after we leave Washington later this week.