The EAC actually survived for months on funds donated by voting machine vendors because:
1. The EAC was not funded. I don't know whether Congress allocated the $ and Bush didn't spend it or what exactly happened, but the EAC had no funds at first to do its job.
2. HAVA was an idiotic law pushed through Congress by Common Cause when Dems were in strong control of the Senate. Common Cause did not have the common sense to consult with any independent computer scientists who were voting system experts who could have instantly told them that HAVA (the way they had written it) was the biggest bonanza for election tampering ever in the history of the U.S. because it gives millions to every state to "upgrade" to inauditable electronic voting systems that enable insiders to tamper with vote counts or innocently miscount a large number of votes in entire counties, states, or the nation, without leaving a trace of evidence.
3. The EAC technical committee is dominated by Britt Williams, one of a tiny handful of PhD computer scientists in America who support paperless voting and his idea of "independent" audits is to have one electronic voting machine part that is independent of another electronic voting machine part, check each other. William's "independent dual verification system" is not independent of insiders within the election system, so that it is a nice-sounding placebo that does not prohibit voting systems that are trivial for insiders to use to tamper with vote counts with machines that no outsider can check vote count accuracy. Britt Williams ushered in paperless DRE voting into Georgia in 2002, and claims that voting systems can be protected from tampering by having the insiders guard them from the outsiders (voters). He doesn't seem to understand that the biggest threat to any system is from insiders and that "independent" audits in the past have always meant "independent of the insiders".
So having the EAC come up with guidelines sooner would not have helped anything, and now Bush has appointed someone to the EAC who emphasizes removing voters from voter registration rolls and apparently helped remove thousands of legal mostly minority voters from the Florida rolls prior to the 2000 election. No decent guidance can be expected from the current EAC IMO.
HAVA was the fault of the Dems for arrogantly rebuffing the help of any independent (of voting machine vendors) computer scientists who are voting system experts when the Dems authored and passed the "get rid of democratic elections" HAVA law which has exascerbated the problems of vote count manipulation and errors in vote counts a hundred-fold since 2000. However, even the old systems which were independently auditable because they often used paper ballots, were mostly counted electronically and not usually audited, and so U.S. vote counting systems have always been wide open to insider tampering - but the difference now is that we've bought new voting systems that are virtually impossible to independently audit. In addition some older systems like lever machines and push-button DREs, were error prone anyway, and easy to tamper with by local election officials by mis-setting the ballot definitions, etc. The newer DREs with paper rolls are virtually inauditable because 60% of voters do not bother with the extra step of verifying the paper rolls, and even if they did bother, the paper rolls are, for all practical purposes, not hand countable, so they are counted using primarily proprietary bar codes, if at all - and many election officials merely reprint electronic machine counts and bipass the paper rolls altogether.
Election activists have tried to pass meaningful legislation since Rush Holt began proposing legislation in 2003, but legislatures may already be substantially corrupted by vote tampering since the 1990's so that there is little hope of passing laws requiring independent audits of hand countable voter verified paper ballots.
The only tool that remains to restore democratic elections may be IF we fund the creation of a national public election data archive for collecting the detailed precinct-level vote count data broken out by vote type that would reveal where votes were miscounted if it were analyzed. Although we have the legal right to this data, it is difficult to obtain because not one county (of the over 3300) releases it publicly. Every county in America right now conglomerates its vote count data in a way that hides evidence of vote tampering prior to publicly releasing it.
However, it is possible to obtain if done intelligently and there are volunteers in some states right now working to set the precedents to obtain that data.
Please read more about this one remaining tool which is a do-able way to detect vote count errors in time to contest elections and put correctly elected candidates into office:
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/Audits_Monitoring.pdfand sign up to help in your own state:
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvData/US/How2CollectData.pdfThe National Election Archive has finally received its 501(c)(3) status from the IRS and so, if it could raise the funds to hire a couple of programmers, could build at least a rudimentary system for volunteers to begin uploading vote count data from a prior election from counties in each state to develop and test the system, which is not trivial because election laws, rules, and procedures vary in each state and often in each county. There is no such thing as a voting system that is tamper-proof from the inside, so that we'll always need to do two things:
1. independently audit - but that requires a hand countable voter verified paper ballot
2. monitor the detailed precinct-level vote count data broken out by vote type - and that we have every legal way to do currently, but need the funding to hire the technical staff and pay for the internet servers to do. It requires collecting official election results in more detail than any county currently releases them from over 3300 counties in a myriad of file formats and file types and making the original election documents publicly available, then parsing the data in all those files in to a standard electronic format and fighting to obtain the data in some states and counties, and convincing candidates not to concede until after obtaining and analyzing the data in their race, something that neither Kerry nor Gore did, not even in Ohio or Florida, despite their having every legal right to do so. Using instinct, rather than actual data to determine where to recount votes, results in actions like Gore's where he asked for recounts of punch-card counties rather than optical scan counties which would have given him the election. Amazing lack of effort to get into office by both Gore and Kerry despite an obviously corrupted vote counting system IMO.
See
http://electionarchive.org
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