HR 811 (The Holt Bill): Time to put us out of its misery

If Congressman Holt is indeed the only leader on the Hill then I respectfully submit his leadership in this area is sorely lacking in the area most important for building good legislation: consensus building.

His office has consistently engaged in the practice of misdirection and disinformation rather than meaningful dialogue, and has intentionally shut out all dissenting voices.

Politicians in Washington may well be used to these kinds of strategies running their political campaigns. But this is not a political campaign, and those of us ordinary citizens engaged in this struggle deserve better thatn the disinformation campaigns and swiftboating of American citizens simply because they hold dissenting opinions about this legislation.

As a result of the stonewalling and closed circuit deliberations, Holt's office has released a bill that is extraordinarily controversial in nature and opposed by a wide swath of the American citizenry, including all major representational organizations of election officials and state legislatures.

At this point in time, I am no longer conducting clause by clause analysis. I will point out the fundamental problems with the bill, which may be used as benchmarks for anyone wishing to continue to attempt to point out the flaws of the bill. I simply do not believe that this bill can be the vehicle for effective and meaningful election reform.

If the bill fails these fundamental benchmarks for democratic elections as defined below, then the bill should not pass. Period.

There is no negotiation and no compromise on defending our democracy.

So here are the most important problems with this bill, which are the benchmarks for improvement and change in order for HR 811 to be considered as a serious contender for our support.

1) It is designed to protect technological e-voting industry interests rather than our democracy.

2) It is overly complex, overly prescriptive, relies on “experts” and “qualified” persons, rather than ordinary citizens. Our elections must be straightforward, able to be run by ordinary citizens, 100% observable, and publicly owned.

3) It replaces the constitutional, historical, and irreplaceable democratic requirement for OBSERVABLE elections with VERIFIABLE elections. These are not equivalent. Providing voters with opportunities to allegedly “verify” computer vote counting--which is inherently impossible anyway because nobody other than the programmer knows what is going on in the trade secret software—is not equivalent to protecting our RIGHT to conduct observable elections.

4) It replaces our right to secure, observable FIRST COUNTS of the votes on election night, with the opportunity to conduct post-election AUDITS. Auditing machine results is not equivalent with our right to hold free, fair, open and democratic elections with observable vote counting of the first count before any winners are announced and peremptorily sworn in (a la Bilbray, San Diego, 2006), or any chain of custody or other issues may arise.

5) It fraudulently represents machine-generated records as “ballots” thereby undermining our time honored system of elections, which use voter marked paper ballots as the vote of record. This obfuscation of terminology has both legal and conceptual implications.

6) It requires new technology for every polling jurisdiction in the nation: the text converter technology. Drafters of the bill have progressively been changing the language of this provision and making claims as to how it might be fulfilled in various ways. The fact is the language is obscure and, if passed as is, interpretations will be thrown to the courts as every interested person sues their state for using one solution over another. The current text reads the requirement to “convert ballot selections into accessible form.” What does this mean? It’s anyone’s guess. Common wisdom in the industry and certainly in the EAC is that voting systems must provide technology conversion of ballot text into many multiple forms of “accessible media” such as audio, pictures, and multiple languages. Given the obvious confluence of EAC standards and Holt Bill text, it is not inconceivable to interpret the provision a la the EAC interpretation. New technologies as defined by the EAC and passed into law by bills like the Holt Bill will cripple local and state economies, place further complex technological walls between the voter and his vote, between citizens and our elections, and the costs will be unacceptably borne by the decline of freedom and democracy and crippling property taxes.

7) The bill is underfunded and rides roughshed over state laws. Drafters of the bill followed the unacceptable practice of using figures brought them by a lobbyist (VoteTrustUSA), rather than conducting honorable due diligence with an eye to county, town and state budgets and legal requirements. In stark contrast to the lobbyist budget inserted into the bill, estimates by diligent state officials indicate that the bill is up to 3-4 times underfunded actual budgeted costs for implementation. Additionally, the bill actually articulates its recommendation for states to follow the prescriptive requirements of the bill and only later enact legislation to support these actions, rather than honoring the sovereignty of state legal infrastructures, which should not be peremptorily overrun in order to satisfy federal legislation.

8) It has unworkable and conflicting requirements and effective dates. The combination of incomprehensible requirements, conflicting timelines, no safe harbor language, and limited ability for states to interpret the bill, all add up to a lot of open doors for litigation and election outcome challenges. This is extremely destabilizing and dangerous to the nation, as we learned in 2000 when only ONE state had a legal challenge to the election outcome. More information on this here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nancy_to_070522_the_real_threat_from.htm

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