EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | James B. Reed
Organization : | Jaburg & Wilk, P.C.
Post Date : | 9/28/2005
Section Comments
Section : | A1C
Page no. : |
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Comment : | April 21, 2005 Dear Committee Members: I submit these comments with some experience in disability election law. I was the national disability outreach director for Dean for America 2004 and for Gore Lieberman 2000, where I served as an observation team leader for Washington County, Florida, during the statewide recount of the 2000 Florida Presidential Election. During 2003, I also was the statewide disability rights attorney for the California State Democratic Party during the 2003 California Governor’s Recall Election. I have been a volunteer election attorney for the Arizona State Democratic Party since 1996, and am a member of the State Party Executive Committee. I also currently chair the Courthouse Access Committee for the State Bar of Arizona Committee on Persons with Disabilities in the Legal Profession. My own disabilities are hemophilia and Multiple Sclerosis. I attended the April 11, 2005 special meeting by the Election Assistance Commission, where I made a suggestion based upon my Arizona experience as an Election Day volunteer attorney. First, I believe, based on the larger percentage of seniors and persons with spinal cord injury who live in Arizona, that there will be higher demands for use of electronic voting equipment in this state. That perspective, however, merely informs me as to the challenges that I believe each state, not just Arizona, will face from underestimates of the number of users of electronic voting equipment on Election Day. First, counties across the nation appear to be considering consolidating their polling places. This may occur, in part, as a response to: 1) the challenges involved in fully training sufficient numbers of poll workers by Election Day; 2) the cost of operating polling places and supplying and operating electronic voting equipment in each polling place; and 3) the increasing number of early voters, which trend will in turn reduce polling place voting on Election Day.