2009 Holt Bill. E-Voting: Making a bad system worse

1. It contains a concealed vote counting provision that allows access to voting machine software only to "qualified" experts and only if they sign a nondisclosure agreement. The Holt Bill will make concealed vote counting federal law. If Holt's bill passes, it would be a federal crime to let the public know whether or not voting machines work as promised!
2. The bill includes a provision for high cost, high tech, as yet non-existent technologies that are allegedly designed to enable "accessibility" to disabled voters. This is another multi-billion dollar boondoggle that enriches the e-voting industry and bankrupts the democratic process by rendering our elections completely opaque and under the control of corporate high tech industries. It is already possible to achieve accessible voting without the use of complex, high cost, opaque, technologies.
3. The bill places a White House agency between the states and their certification of election results. It requires states to provide all kinds of data to the EAC in order to certify election results. The obvious conflict of interest in having the White House involved in election certifications opens the door to dangerous litigation should the EAC agency take issue with the data or the election results. This places election results in the hands of the Executive branch and possibly even the Judiciary, which may once again be called upon to decide election outcomes.
4. The bill subverts the election night first count as the vote of record and replaces it with the results from post-election sampling. Post-election sampling is highly vulnerable to chain of custody risk vectors of all kinds. Furthermore, the sampling (or “audits”) so far proposed by Holt, are not statistically adequate to ensure any reliable verification of election night results.

Holt supporters advocate for the bill because it provides incremental progress, in that it requires durable paper ballots in every election system.

But the negative Gore vote count in Florida happened in a system using durable paper ballots.

The problem was they were counted in a concealed electronic count with no public oversight.

The incremental step of getting paper ballots into every voting system offers a placebo effect to make people feel good without improving the democratic process.

Holt's bill expands corporate control over our elections, usurps public authority and oversight, subverts election night vote counts, and allows for White House intervention in election results.

We have no excuse to compromise on democracy. We now know too much about e-voting and its risks. We understand the perils of concealed electronic vote counting and corporate control over our elections. We know, too, that post-election samples of possibly compromised ballots do not legitimately replace election night public vote counts.

Today, Americans are demanding change in broad strokes: for our health care, our economy, our environment, our education… and, yes, our elections.

We cannot allow the Holt Bill to pass.

Election reform efforts must focus on restoring voting rights: repeal HAVA, eliminate the EAC , and honor our tradition of representational democracy, self-governance, and public oversight of our elections.

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