Buster Soaries, Election Assistance Commission Chair, is optimistic about accomplishing EAC's mission, despite a late start

VotingNews Brief #57: Buster Soaries, Election Assistance Commission Chair, tells Latest VotingNews exclusively that if the EAC doesn't answer the question of SERVE's non-certification, the agency will have "failed the country"

Washington, D.C.
January 15, 2004

By Marc Strassman
Voting Technology Reporter
The Latest VotingNews

Buster Soaries is the Chair of the newly-formed Election Assistance Commission. "Newly-formed" is right; the EAC came into legal existence ten days ago, on January 5, 2004. Commissioner Soaries jokingly admits that he's had to spend more time so far trying to get letterhead for his office than he's spent "crafting a vision" for the Commission and the country.

Nevertheless, in the interview below the Commissioner spends most of his time addressing the important issues that are involved in creating such a vision for national voting reform.

A major hurdle facing the Commission is to review and publish reports from all the states outlining their plans for upgrading and reforming their election infrastructure and procedures. It's required by law to do this BEFORE it can begin to disburse the $800 million dollars it has to the individual states to upgrade their voting equipment and improve their election practices.

Due to the exigencies attendant to its neo-natal status, the EAC, according to Mr. Soaries, hasn't yet had the time to formulate the criteria according to which it will review these documents, nor, reasonably, given that, have the Commissioners started to actually review these documents, which Mr. Soaries says will be evaluated personally by the four new commissioners.

Once the reviewing is done, there will be the legal requirement of publishing these reports in the Federal Register. The EAC will have to pay for this and it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, money it doesn't have. According to Mr. Soaries, government lawyers are now looking for ways to meet the statutory publishing requirements with the smallest possible expenditure and other experts are looking at ways to possibly pare down the size and complexity of the reports so that they can be published at a lower cost.

Despite its late start, Mr. Soaries believes that his agency will be able to deliver the election assistance that is its mission to the states in time to have a positive impact in 2004, at least in the fall election. He was hopeful that EAC money would be going to the states BEFORE the June, 2004, statutory deadline, saying, "…we will be working to do it as quickly as we can....I'll be disappointed if we don't get it done before June. I would consider myself a failure if the states have to wait as long as June simply because the law allows it."

Commissioner Soaries, who ran unsuccessfully in 2002 against New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt, the author of a pending House bill strengthening requirements for voter-verifiable paper audit trails on touch-screen voting machines, was asked if the EAC would be taking a position on this issue. He said that the role of the EAC on the question of the auditability of touch-screen voting machines is "to be a legitimate arbiter between the views and to create some consensus and clarity and advise the country on what we learn."

Asked about how the Pentagon could be allowed to let military personnel and other overseas citizens vote remotely over the Internet, using the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) system, which cannot at present be certified according to the existing Federal Voting Systems Standards (FVSS), since they don't contain any criteria for certifying remote Internet voting systems, Mr. Soaries said, "I think that's a legitimate question; I think it's an urgent question and I think if we fail, if the EAC fails, to expedite a process to answer that question, then we've failed the country."

Even before the logical follow-up question could be posed to him, Commissioner Soaries took the discussion to the next level, asking preemptively and rhetorically, "If it can be for the military, then why can't it be for the general public?"

Then he went on to say, "I don't think we're gonna get there this year, to be frank with you, given the challenges that I know we have; we're not going to get an answer to that question this year, but I can assure you that if I'm still in Washington at the end of the year we will have begun the process of getting very close to a good answer next year."