Leadership Quote by DeForest Soaries

It is a rare kind of bureaucratic honesty: the system is broken not because of one bad machine, but because the rules are designed to make accountability optional. DeForest Soaries isn’t lamenting a technical glitch; he’s pointing at an institutional escape hatch. Without mandatory standards, you can’t meaningfully declare a device unfit, because “unfit” has no legal definition. And even if you manage to draft standards, calling them “voluntary” turns oversight into etiquette.

The intent here is to pressure lawmakers and election officials by naming the quiet absurdity at the heart of election administration: the state demands public trust while refusing to guarantee basic uniformity. “We have no basis” is the key phrase. It’s the language of a regulator with hands tied, signaling that the absence of standards is not neutral - it’s a choice that protects vendors and disperses responsibility across jurisdictions until no one is answerable.

The subtext is sharper: controversies over voting equipment often get framed as partisan paranoia or conspiracy bait. Soaries flips that frame. He’s arguing that the real scandal is procedural. If the public wants confidence in results, the state must be able to do the boring, unglamorous thing: set enforceable benchmarks and pull defective tools from use.

Contextually, this lands in the post-2000 election era, when “hanging chads” and malfunctioning machines exposed how fragmented U.S. election infrastructure is. Soaries is voicing a reformer’s frustration: you can’t audit legitimacy with guidelines that function like suggestions.