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its newly established Voting System Testing and Certification Program. 16 Pursuant to the Quality MonitoringProgram established in the Voting System Testing and Certification Program Manual (the “VSTCPM”) theEAC will post on its website “test reports” for all systems tested for EAC certification, regardless of whether ornot they are ultimately certified. These test reports will include a list of “discrepancies” identified during thetesting. 17 It will also post information related to site audits that it conducts on manufacturers who participatein its program. 18Under the VSTCPM, vendors must report to the EAC “malfunctions” of EAC certified systems. TheVSTCPM defines “malfunction” as “a failure of a voting system, not caused solely by operator oradministrative error, which causes the system to cease operation during a Federal election or otherwiseresults in data loss.” 19 The EAC will also post this information on its website. The EAC recentlyinformed the Brennan Center that it intends to post a map showing all jurisdictions that use EACcertified systems, with links to all vendor reported anomalies for such systems. 20 Finally, of relevanceto this report, election officials may voluntarily report “anomalies” for such systems if they result “insome disruption to the election process,” provided the election officials provide their name, title, andjurisdiction, among other information. 21This new system had two recent important public successes. The first occured on June 25, 2010, whenthe EAC put out a “Voting System Technical Advisory” (VSTA) for the ES&S Unity 3.2.0.0 system,which has been certified by the EAC. The advisory came two months after Jane Platten, Director ofthe Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, notified the EAC that during testing of the machines priorto a May primary election, approximately 10 percent of the machines started powering down and thenfreezing. 22 After extensive consultation with both ES&S and Cuyahoga County, the VSTA was sentto election officials using the same system, advising them what steps to take in the event this freeze orpower failure occurred during opening or closing of the polls, or during voting. 23On August 23, 2010, the EAC issued a VSTA for the MicroVote EMS 4.0B, noting that the votingpanel for the system’s Direct Recording Electronic device would not operate with certain flash cards. 24While the recent steps by the EAC are unquestionably valuable, there are a number of factors which limit theusefulness of this reporting system. They are discussed in greater detail in Section IV (A Better Way to Trackand Address Voting System Problems) of this report. A summary of some of the most serious limitations of thecurrent system follows:• Perhaps most importantly, the EAC only certified its first voting system in February 2009 – meaningthat almost none of the machines currently in use in the United States are covered by VSTCPMreporting rules, or any federal reporting requirements, for that matter. Of the approximately 4,600election jurisdictions in the United States, we are aware of only a few dozen 25 that will use EAC certifiedequipment in 2010. In other words, approximately 99 percent of U.S. jurisdictions in 2010 will beusing equipment that is not certified by the EAC and therefore not covered by this program.• As most polling place equipment in use in the United States was purchased after 2002, and becausemany jurisdictions replacing equipment are likely to continue to use non-EAC certified equipmentin the future, we expect it could be decades before even a large majority of jurisdictions in the UnitedStates are using EAC certified systems. 26 In fact, only twelve states require federal certification fornew systems, so – absent changes at the state level – it is not certain that the EAC’s programwill ever cover most jurisdictions in the United States. 278 | Brennan Center for Justice