A recent letter to the U.S. Congress and other elected officials from information quality professionals expresses concerns about the provisions of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (public law 107-252), which sets guidelines for replacing punch card or lever-type voting machines with electronic voting machines.

The letter’s signers see U.S. elections at grave risk, warn about the lack of ways to observe the effect of changes being introduced in election processes, call for incorporating reliable quality processes and urge election officials to assess election results through a count of randomly sampled ballots.

The letter asserts that a systems approach should address the process as a whole, not just the technology itself; that the election process yields vote counts as an information product; and that quality measures of information products reveal the effects of defects in a process, even if the causes aren’t yet known. Root causes can then be identified and corrected.

For more information, download www.votetrustusa.org/pdfs/IQ_on_VVSG_10-05-06.rtf.

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