Utah GOP Sen. Bob Bennett is spearheading the effort with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. They are the leading members of the Senate Rules Committee, which held its third hearing on the bill Wednesday prior to a full Senate vote.

“Unfortunately, we have a history of vote manipulation and vote fraud that runs deep in American history,” Bennett said. “It was there during the time we had pure paper ballots, and it has been there when we went to voting machines.”

Since elections are governed primarily at the state level, the Feinstein-Bennett bill is big on goals but vague on specifics. Every state would have to allow voters to verify that the computer tabulated their votes correctly, whether this is a paper record or some other technology, such as audio, picture or video by 2012. States would also perform regular election audits, but the bill would allow the states to determine how and when.

The bill also would require more regular testing of the machines and allows “appropriate government experts” to have access to the voting software to make sure a software malfunction doesn't affect the results of a contest.

Feinstein would prefer that the country stop using electronic machines altogether and move to paper ballots read by an optical scanner, but she said she would compromise “to bolster election security and reliability.

“It is the best I believe we can or will do in this area,” she said.

The bill would have little effect in Utah, said Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert's chief of staff Joseph Demma.

Utah already has independent voter verification in the form of a paper record that voters can check. The paper is printed next to the touch screen and is under a sheet of Plexiglas. Utah also already audits one to five percent of voting machines after each election and has done so since November 2006.

Bennett and Feinstein heard from experts Wednesday who offered a few tweaks to a bill that they all supported. The panel included representatives of state voting officials, county and city voting staffs, a civil rights attorney, an advocate for voters with disabilities and a computer scientist who develops voting technology.

Most of the debate focused on the 2012 deadline, which voting officials thought may be a stretch. They also encouraged audits to focus on tight races and suggested Congress provide more funding to train poll workers, a move Bennett seemed to support.

“Virtually every instance of vote fraud that I have looked into involves a poll worker,” he said.

mcanham@sltrib.com