David Price: “Mr. Chairman, error-prone voting equipment is an emergency situation that threatens our democracy, and we need an…”

“Mr. Chairman, error-prone voting equipment is an emergency situation that threatens our democracy, and we need an immediate response. I commend the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Hastings) for offering an amendment that offers such a response. It is going to take some money to upgrade voting technology from error-prone punch card and other systems to reliable machines. We simply cannot afford to do nothing. Just look at what error-prone voting equipment like punch cards does to our democracy. A study done by Cal Tech and MIT revealed that the spoilage rate for punch cards was as many as 986,000 ballots in 2000. In Florida last year the spoilage rate for punch cards was almost 4 percent. And in Cook County, Illinois, it was 5 percent during the last election. Earlier this year, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the gentleman from California (Mr. Horn) and I and other colleagues introduced the Voting Improvement Act, which would make buy-out grants available to any jurisdiction that used punch card voting systems in the last election.”