Three public meetings are coming up in relation to HAVA in New Hampshire. This Friday, the New Hampshire HAVA State Plan Committee is meeting to finalize the preparation of the NH HAVA State Plan. This meeting is open to the public. In June there will be two public information hearings on the NH HAVA State Plan, one on June 2 and the other on June 7.

In New Hampshire, we take our voting seriously. Year after year we fight to maintain our status as the first in the nation primary. When presidential candidates come to town we ask them hard hitting questions. And when we cast our ballots to vote, 47% of us use hand marked, hand counted paper ballots.

That's right. In nearly half the state, voters enter their old Town Halls, mark their ballots by hand, hand those ballots to the Moderator who places them in a ballot box to be counted by hand when the polls close. In nearly half the state, we have no voting machines at all within our voting precincts.

This distinctly New Hampshire characteristic of our election system mirrors the Granite State culture and history. We live on land bounded by stone walls, in which each stone was put in place by hand, carefully and precisely to create solid boundaries for the fields in which we made our living.

The ritual of hand marking and hand counting our ballots binds us to our communities as solidly as those stone walls.

But by 2006, this could all change. By 2006, every single precinct in New Hampshire could have electronic voting machines.

In 2002, following the disastrous 2000 presidential election, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to "set standards for the administration of federal elections." According to the text of the law, HAVA was designed to:

establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections, and for other purposes.

Since its inception, HAVA has been met with both skepticism and confusion. Lynne Landes has conducted a series of investigative reports on the corporations behind the voting machine industry, corporations with questionable histories and lots of money to fund the kind of lobbying efforts that ultimately resulted in HAVA. But the truth is, while the marketing forces from the private election industry have created the illusion that HAVA calls for it, there is no mandate in HAVA for electronic voting.

Here is the exact text from HAVA regarding the requirements for voting systems:

HAVA requires that all voting systems used in federal elections:

• maintain voter privacy and ballot confidentiality
• permit voters to verify their selections on the ballot, notify them of overvotes, and permit them to change their votes and correct any errors before casting the ballot; however, jurisdictions using paper ballot, punchcard or central-count voting systems (including absentee and mail-in ballots) may instead use voter education and instruction programs for notification of overvotes
• produce a permanent paper record for the voting system that can be audited manually and is available as an official record for recounts
• provide to individuals with disabilities, including the blind and visually impaired, the same accessibility to voting as other voters
• provide alternative language accessibility as required by law
• comply with the error rate standards in the federal voting system standards in effect on the date of enactment

Here in New Hampshire the office of the Secretary of State has been working on a plan to implement HAVA. This office maintains an information-rich website on New Hampshire's HAVA State Plan and other HAVA-related activities. Because our election system is already in pretty good shape, the two key changes HAVA is bringing to New Hampshire are the creation of a centralized voter database and the requirement to better address the needs of the disabled.

The creation of a centralized voter database means that for the first time in our history, all New Hampshire voting precincts will be electronically networked. It also means that the voter database will be linked to the Department of Motor Vehicles database, and who knows what else. This raises serious security and privacy concerns with respect to our election system and our citizenry. These concerns must be aired and addressed by the state in its HAVA plan.

The need to address voting accessibility for the disabled by no means requires an electronic voting machine solution. Other solutions must be explored to preserve the integrity of the New Hampshire culture and the integrity of our voting systems.

The truth is, HAVA is not so complicated, and our solutions in New Hampshire must be designed to preserve the traditions we cherish.