Q: The commission exists in large part because of the many problems that have plagued polling stations and elections in the recent past. With record turnout expected this year and the election less than three months away, is the U.S. ready to vote? Will we be?

Rodriguez: We have an idea of what can go wrong. We have seen a variety of things related mostly, I think, to election management. Do we have enough ballots? Are election administrators prepared in case something goes wrong? Those are the potential vulnerabilities in the system, and so the EAC's working really hard to make sure that everybody's ready and that they've done their worst-case scenario planning and they have all the right people at the table in that planning.

Q: Do you think they're there yet?

Rodriguez: [Laughs] Well, we've asked the local jurisdictions to file their contingency plans with the state. That's one of our best practices. And if the state wants to send them to the EAC, we'll hold them here. But we don't have any yet.... A lot of folks already have contingency plans in place, but some evidence of those plans would probably instill confidence for the voter.

Q: Why haven't more states passed them along to your office?

Rodriguez: It's not required, but it is in our best practices guidelines. To speculate, it might be the local nature of the way elections are conducted. Not every secretary can require their counties, or whatever their makeup is, to furnish them with that kind of information. But I think it's a good idea for legislatures in the future to take a look at.

Q: Are states taking this seriously looking ahead to the election?

Rodriguez: Yes. You've heard about the states, like Florida, that just said, "There's not going to be an opportunity to doubt what happens in the state of Florida. We're going to go with the system that we think bears the most scrutiny." So they've gone from that extreme -- and in New Mexico, the governor just said, replace the whole system -- to states like Ohio and Colorado and California that tested the equipment from scratch, did the complete recertification of their equipment, before they certified it for this election. So there's a variety of things going on in 2008, new systems or newly recertified equipment in a couple of states, that I think is all designed to instill voter confidence.

Q: You probably saw the recent report [PDF] from NYU's Brennan Center that said that flawed ballot design remains a problem eight years after the 2000 election recount. What is the EAC doing to address the issue? At what point is it too late to fix the problem?

Rodriguez: We actually worked with a number of members of Brennan's panel and continue to work with a number of their panel on their project on that very issue. About a year ago, we issued hundreds of templates: good ballot design, good signage, best practices. But we've had a workshop on it. It's big --again, one of our big issues. Some states have statutes that are very proscriptive related to ballot design, and Florida is one of them. So Florida has codified some of the worst practices in ballot design.

But there are some very commonsensical things that Brennan recommended that we also recommend -- things like one race per screen. Apparently, the voter's eye is drawn to the center of the screen; it's just human nature. In Sarasota County, which is one of the examples the Brennan Center cited, they had the governor's race, lieutenant governor and then the congressional race on there, and it was muddled up. The voter is naturally going to miss things unless they're prepared with a sample ballot. In most cases, actually, they have a higher accuracy rate when they have a sample ballot with them. These things make a lot of sense, and there is time, if your state statutes allow it, to incorporate good ballot design into your election.

Q: Is it frustrating to broadcast this message and not know if people are picking up on it?

Rodriguez: It is. We're starting to see our efforts bear some fruit. I think one of the major examples is, on Super Tuesday, 26,000 voters found us and found our Web site. Most of them were looking for their primary polling place or their caucus location. We took a few phone calls, but thousands of people found where they needed to be through our Web site. So I think if we try to keep our visibility up, I think not only election administrators will turn to us as a resource, but voters, too. But it's definitely a building process. We feel like we're very much on the ground floor.

Q: Many states are starting to transition away from touch-screen voting machines, in part because of concerns over their lack of paper trail. Is that switch something you're actively encouraging?

Rodriguez: No. HAVA doesn't distinguish, and so we don't distinguish, either. But we do think it's important to really stress that election management guidelines such as chain of command, and logic and accuracy testing, and all of the things that can build voter confidence, are really transparent, strictly adhered to, so that the election administrator can tell their community, "This equipment is properly stored, nobody inappropriate's handling it. Look here, today we're doing the logic and accuracy testing, you can come and watch." I mean, we're really encouraging transparency, and -- develop a plan and then stick to it. Don't deviate from what you say you're going to do.

Again, it all kind of keeps going back to election management. If you manage your operation in a transparent, trust-building way, you might be able to build it. It's this optimism that we have that if you do it right, you'll see the process improved.

Q: Is that enough to assuage voter fears that machines are being hacked into? That's another thing that comes up frequently. Is that being looked at systematically?

Rodriguez: Well, the new voting system guidelines -- we're really trying to develop a risk model that's not only realistic but anticipates every possible threat. We probably should have done it earlier in the process for the next iteration of voting system guidelines, but I'm a great believer in once you realize you should have done something, just go ahead and do it. So right now, we're working on an RFP [Request for Proposal] to have someone really help us prepare a threat scenario or a risk model that is as comprehensive as possible, so that we can build it into our next iteration of voting system guidelines and then answer some of those concerns through the next iteration.

Q: So machines in this election aren't going to have had those guidelines?

Rodriguez: Well, there's not a system in use. My understanding is Virginia is replacing their system; Virginia had kind of a daisy chain of computers -- it was chained at the precinct level -- but my understanding is they've replaced that. So there's nobody that's going to have equipment that's linked together. That's a really important point. They're what's called closed-loop, standalone machines, and really not linked to something downtown.... It's really, really -- well, I'll say almost impossible because, again, I haven't seen a risk model that goes through everything -- to hack into one of these closed-loop, standalone machines. It's just very difficult....

No system is 100 percent fail-safe, unfortunately. And I know that's what people want. People want certainty. I want certainty.

Q: Were there any takeaways from the primaries that are applicable for November?

Rodriguez: It's being prepared, having enough ballots. That wasn't a problem in New Mexico; they had to destroy a bunch of ballots, they overestimated the participation. And that's better than underestimating, because one county in Maryland ran out of ballots.... Indiana, if you don't show up with a government-issued ID, you're not going to be able to vote. That's an important lesson for the voter in Indiana, that they've really got to get their stuff in order now.

Q: Since the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002, have the country's voting systems improved?

Rodriguez: I think so. First of all, we've got all these management guidelines available. There's very few schools you can go to to become an election administrator, so these materials are very important. The other thing is the equipment, the funding to replace equipment like the punch card system, although there are some folks saying, well, the punch cards weren't so bad. Well, they created a lot of chaos in 2000, and it's probably a good thing that we're not using them anymore....

The other thing is the privacy right finally realized for the handicapped voter, the blind voter -- who can finally vote in privacy. That's really important. So I think the Help America Vote Act has helped. Again, we're building the ground floor. I think it's just going to get better.

Q: Every election seems to have something go wrong. Is it possible to hope for a perfect election?

Rodriguez: [laughs] Well, I'm hopeful. But the good thing about our elections is that they're local. And there's a reason for that. I mean, they're a lot harder to manipulate because they're run within states by a local jurisdiction. There's almost something comforting in that. It's an expected byproduct, you know -- nobody can go in and try to rig the whole system, because it's impossible....

So if there are problems, they're probably going to be local, and they won't bring down a whole state -- it'll be that jurisdiction, which in 2006 was Denver. I was president of the Denver City Council, and we had people waiting in line for two or three hours to vote because the electronic poll book couldn't bear the strain of the turnout, which was low.... People got home at 11 o'clock that night -- voters. But the whole state of Colorado didn't tumble because of it. It was just one jurisdiction within a state. So I think if there are problems, they'll be local and we'll be able to deal with them.