Election Technology Research Act of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. LUCAS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 4990, the Election Technology Research Act of 2020. I am proud to join Representatives Sherrill and Gonzalez and Chairwoman Johnson as an original cosponsor of this bill.

The security and integrity of elections is fundamental to American democracy and should not be a partisan issue. To that end, this bipartisan bill takes necessary and appropriate steps to update research activities at the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to promote the security and the modernization of U.S. voting systems.

The bill also establishes an election systems center of excellence at NIST to foster collaborations between NIST, universities, and State and local election officials to address election security challenges.

The U.S. Constitution vests the responsibility of administering elections with State and local governments, and we in Congress should respect the boundaries of this well-established system of federalism.

However, the Federal Government has an important role to play in providing guidance and assistance to States on election systems. The Federal Government can and should work closely with States and local government officials to deal with foreign and domestic cyber threats.

This bill provides the research tools to do just that, and it does so without imposing costly or burdensome mandates on States. Instead, this bill leverages an established system to provide voluntary guidelines to State and local election officials to use as they see fit.

I appreciate Chairwoman Johnson and her staff for working with us to produce a good, bipartisan bill.

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Mr. LUCAS. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Gonzalez).

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Mr. LUCAS. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), a fellow ranking member on a full committee and always an insightful individual.

Mr. RODNEY DAVIS of Illinois. Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend from Oklahoma for yielding and for the glowing recommendation there. I think I could have gotten a better one from Mr. Perlmutter over there. It is great to be here. It is great to be among friends and great to see bipartisanship.

This is an example of what the House of Representatives should do on a regular basis, have fun, joke around, like Ranking Member Lucas and I do on regular occasions. This is what we should do on a wide variety of other pieces of legislation, including what we want to do before the end of this month, how we want to fill the holes in the stimulus bill that we passed back months and months ago in a very bipartisan way.

I have to raise some concerns about this piece of legislation because the House Administration Committee got this bill sent to the committee last November and, unfortunately, as has been the norm in this Congress and on this committee, we didn't hold one meaningful hearing or markup on this bill.

The Chair waived our jurisdiction in February, and now 7 months later this bill is on the House floor without ever being discussed by the committee with jurisdiction over Federal election issues.

H.R. 4990 allocates over $100 million over the next 5 years to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in order to conduct election system research and distribute grants to higher-education institutions and nonprofits.

Funding expanded research at NIST, a nonregulatory agency of the Department of Commerce, would allow the agency to circumvent policy priorities set by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a politically balanced agency.

This is especially concerning when we know there have already been calls for more transparency when it comes to the work that NIST does on behalf of the EAC. Currently, EAC commissioners are not regularly updated on the projects that they task NIST with. There is no timeline for completion and no reporting structure. H.R. 4990 further empowers NIST without proportional accountability to the EAC.

I have addressed this issue previously in my bill H.R. 5707, the Protect American Voters Act, PAVA, by calling election-related work of NIST to be more accessible and visible by directing them to issue a report to Congress every year containing the status, timeline, and estimated completion of activities that they are tasked with under HAVA.

Additionally, H.R. 4990 would expand the voting system definition to include nonvoting technology in the already overwhelmed voluntary voting system guidelines process.

We have been waiting for updated HAVA guidelines, or VVSG 2.0, for over a decade now. So while I absolutely believe guidelines for nonvoting equipment, such as e-poll books are needed, adding more to the VVSG process likely isn't going to get this done.

My bill, PAVA, addresses this by bypassing the costly and time- consuming VVSG process and calls for the EAC to establish a separate process for testing and certifying guidelines for nonvoting election equipment.

The bottom line, H.R. 4990 does not update HAVA, and allocates over $100 million to the discretion of NIST, rather than investing in the bipartisan independent government agency created by Congress. And that agency is well-versed in elections. The EAC provides guidance, not mandates. Keeping power at the EAC preserves States' primary and constitutional role in administering Federal elections.

This House should work in a real, bipartisan fashion to create the election reform that the American people deserve. I am willing and ready whenever my colleagues on both sides of the aisle would like to do this.

I am happy we see bipartisanship today as this bill works its way through the process after it passes today. I certainly hope that the sponsors and my colleagues can work with us to address some of the concerns that I raise today.

I thank, again, Ranking Member Lucas. I will give him a glowing recommendation, too, of nothing.

And I thank the sponsors of this bill, Ms. Sherrill and Mr. Gonzales, for your work in this field. I would like to work with you to address some of these concerns as we move it to the Senate. Thank you for your time today.

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Mr. LUCAS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank Chairwoman Johnson, Chairwoman Sherrill, and Representative Anthony Gonzalez for working together in a bipartisan manner to produce measured legislation that will help secure and modernize America's voting systems.

I encourage my colleagues to support this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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