Law Commons^™

Voting And Registration Technology Issues: Lessons From 2008, S. Candice Hoke, David Jefferson

S. Candice Hoke

This chapter reviews the 2008 election performance and scientific assessment records of the two major Help America Vote Act (HAVA) promoted election technologies considered here, the voting systems themselves and, to a lesser extent, the statewide voter-registration databases, to delineate both their performance records and the statutory and regulatory apparatus that produced the technological shift. Perhaps surprisingly, HAVA's role in generating each of these election technologies is quite different. While HAVA mandated and constituted the originating impetus for most of the statewide voter registration database systems that were in use for the 2008 election cycle, and provided major financial incentives …