MoveOn and HR811 (the Holt Bill)

The NH Fair Elections Committee remains opposed to HR811, and we hope to be reporting, after Wednesday's vote in the House, that our two NH Democratic representatives will have realized they are in Washington to represent New Hampshire, whose key stakeholder constituencies (NH Secretary Bill Gardner, the NH Association of City and Town Clerks, the NH Fair Elections Committee) uniformly oppose the bill, and not the Democratic Party, which seems intent to ram it through come hell or highwater.

After telling lobbyists representing state and local election officials the bill would not come up for a vote for at least two weeks, the Party leadership has intentionally put HR811 on this week's calendar. No doubt, they are hoping to stem the tide of overwhelming citizen opposition because of the Labor Day holiday.

They must remember how citizen outcry literally shut down the House Administration Committee's e-mail system when that Committee tried to fast track the bill to the House floor for a speedy and thoughtless vote of passage in the Spring.

Now, MoveOn is issuing yet another of their communications about the bill, replete with misinformation - or is it just information "left out" when they fail to acknowledge or inform their membership that the vast majority of grassroots activists oppose the bill?

But what's different this time is they are asking their members how they feel about it. If you have a MoveOn vote, now is the time to tell them NO TO 811.

Voting integrity activists have been telling MoveOn how we feel about the bill for a long time. It is true that last year, many activists supported the Holt Bill, but at this time every single true grassroots leadership organization opposes it. This includes BlackBoxVoting, VotersUnite, the Coalition for Voting Integrity, the NH Fair Elections Committee, and more. Within a 2-week period in the dead of winter, last December, 2006, wethepatriots.org collected nearly 2,000 signatures of citizens and organizations opposed to the bill.

We have a list of at least 100 citizen action groups and leaders opposed to this legislation (shown at bottom of this post).

The fact is, MoveOn has been wrong on this issue since day one. They and Common Cause have been selling the bill to their members as a "paper trail" bill, ignoring the dangers and complexities in the bill's language, and falsely delivering a message of hope to their members, who have come to believe that they can trust without question what these two organizations tell them.

HR811 is an extraordinarily complex bill. Most ordinary citizens don't want to wade through its twisted language. Maybe the leaders of these organizations don't want to read it. But how about our Congressional representatives, who we pay to do that? Do they have time to read the bill?

If MoveOn can change its tune, now is the time. The nation's welfare is at stake.

The "compromise" version could easily be called the "Microsoft Bill". This version makes secret vote counting federal law, making it a federal crime for anyone to tell the public what they find when they look at the code counting 80% of the nation's votes. And the only people allowed to look at that code are "qualified" people under very specific circumstances who sign nondisclosure agreements.

If this law had been in place in 2003, Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.ORG would be sitting in a federal prison for her act of patriotism, which exposed to the national sunshine the diabolical nature of Diebold Election System's proprietary, secret vote counting software.

Because of its complexities, the bill would also subject every state in the nation to unlimited electoral litigation challenges. Think about Florida 2000 if you want to imagine the outcomes from having the courts decide our elections for us.

The NH Dept. of State has estimated the bill will cost NH property tax payers $4MIL for the first 5 years and $11 MIL each year after that for the next 15 years.

The bill mandates an entirely new, unnecessary, and untested technology for every polling place in the nation. It will turn New Hampshire's election system on its head. It will turn the nation's election syseitems on their heads.

Tell MoveOn "NO TO HR811" and tell your Congressional reps the same.

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