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September 2, 2007 at 10:22:17

Headlined on 9/2/07:
MoveOn and HR811 (the Holt Bill)

by Nancy Tobi     Page 2 of 3 page(s)

www.opednews.com

 

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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.

We can do better than this. And our system of representational democracy can not afford the full frontal attack HR811 wages against it.

 1  |  2  |  3

 

Nancy Tobi is cofounder, former Chair, website editor for Democracy for New Hampshire (DFNH), and Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee. Nancy is the author of numerous articles on election integrity, including "The Gifts of HAVA: Time to Ask for a Refund," "What's Wrong with the Holt Bill," "We're Counting the Votes: An Election Preparedness Kit," and "Hands-on Elections: An Information Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People". Her article about election reform fallacies is included in the April 2008 book "Losers Take All" edited by Mark Crispin Miller.

Nancy believes in the principles embodied in our Constitution, and that groups like Election Defense Alliance and DFNH can play a unique role by empowering ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

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3 comments

I am concerned about the intentions of our elected leaders.
Stephen HartI am concerned about the intentions of our elected leaders.

I was very dissapointed in MoveOn survey. I voted No to Holt

I was very dissapointed in the text MoveOn accompanied their survey with.

They mentioned the red herring of handicapped voting as though it was the driving issue, and insurmountable in the absence of Holt, though some handicapped organizations have acted with direct funding from voting machine manufacturers. The only "controversy" they mentioned was receipt type ballot records (which is bad enough to kill the measure, in my opinion). Then they failed to mention several concerns that have been voiced, such as yours and many others which Blackboxvoting.org has documented for the last two years.

As you say, it is a very complex bill, and MoveOn seems determined to engineer favorable survey results for it. After voting against it, I emailed MoveOn with my concerns.

by Stephen Hart (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 23 comments) on Monday, September 3, 2007 at 5:37:12 PM
 


Computer Consultant
Mark-MyWordsComputer Consultant

Another Point of View, Supportive of HR-811

Despite the changes to the bill brought to light here, there's a reason HR-811 maintains a strong base of support among the public and various progressive groups.  I'd like to make quick mention of it here.

While it's true that HR-811 does not provide an air-tight solution to the potential for electronic voting machines to report erroneous polling results, its core purpose, that of a meaningful audit that will catch errant software releases and voting machine models red-handed, is still intact, stronger than it was in Holt's earlier bills.

Auditing doesn't prevent fraud, but it will undoubtedly bring it to light.  If there's anywhere near the level of faultiness and/or fraud in these machines as most readers of this publication, myself included, think there is, HR-811 will create the political climate -- through mass public awareness of the cancer of electronic voting machines -- that proponents of much stronger controls would need in order to have sweeping changes find their way through a largely out-of-touch, influence-drenched Congress.

(My favorite "control", by the way, is Kucinich-promoted Canadian-style Hand-Count Paper Ballots...  I just believe it's HR-811 that will pave the way for that kind of sweeping change.)

That's why HR-811's supporters are still with it, despite a conference process that seems to have had as many vendors as issue advocates present.

by Mark-MyWords (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 7 comments) on Monday, September 3, 2007 at 6:27:35 PM
 


Jerry Berkman has been active in the Election Integrity movement since the 2004 election. He helped organize the grassroots support for the campaign of Debra Bowen to be California Secretary of State.

Jerry retired in May, 2005 after working for 35 years as a computer programmer, the last 30 at the University of California, Berkeley.

He earned a Computer Security Certification from the SANS Institute in 2003, with a paper on Security Issues in Running an Email Server.

Jerry BerkmanJerry Berkman has been active in the Election Integrity movement since the 2004 election. He helped organize the grassroots support for the campaign of Debra Bowen to be California Secretary of State.

Jerry retired in May, 2005 after working for 35 years as a computer programmer, the last 30 at the University of California, Berkeley.

He earned a Computer Security Certification from the SANS Institute in 2003, with a paper on Security Issues in Running an Email Server.

Auditing won't find flaws


How do you guarantee the ballots you are auditing are the ones that were counted?  This requires chain-of-custody controls, which I doubt will be adequate/secure.

In California, if a paper ballot does not go through the optical scanner properly, the elections staff either "enhances" the ballot or copies the votes onto another ballot.  This process will not be audited.

John Tuteur, County Clerk of Napa County, CA testified, July 2, 2007:

In the last election, Napa had to duplicate almost one fourth of the paper ballots. The duplication is not currently observed, but could be.

 

by Jerry Berkman (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments) on Monday, September 3, 2007 at 11:53:55 PM
 

 

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