On Sep. 1, MoveOn.org Political Action sent members an email asking them to vote on whether MoveOn should support Rep. Rush Holt's election reform bill, H.R. 811.
This article discusses the problems with H.R. 811 and the problems MoveOn has in how it is handling this (and other) Election Integrity issues.
H.R. 811 is on the docket to be voted on this week in the House of Representatives. Contact your Representative now!
MoveOn ignores most of the issues
H.R. 811 is 60 pages long. MoveOn's summary is less than 20 lines. It leaves out many, many issues, and does not give links to any further discussion. How can you ask for direction on a very complicated and technical issue, without providing background?
MoveOn lists H.R. 811 supporters, but not opponents
MoveOn lists People for the American Way, the Brennan Center, and Common Cause as supporting H.R. 811. It does not list opponents. In fact, most of the Election Integrity community either opposes H.R. 811 or has not taken a stand.
The following organizations have campaigns asking Congress to not pass H.R. 811 as is:
I've worked with the author to try to strengthen the bill, but have not taken a position in support. Again, I am concerned that if we put the whole concept of a voter verified paper trail into statute and it's something that we know is problematic ... , we may find ourselves, once again, trying to improve something that's very expensive and that we'd better do right in the first place. (from audio linked in this article.)
Paper ballots or paper trails?
MoveOn refers to the bill as Holt's "paper ballots bill, H.R. 811". To most people, a paper ballot is like an absentee ballot, i.e. a piece of paper or cardboard which is marked by pencil or pen. Many electronic voting machines produce a paper trail on a strip of paper, like that of an ATM or cash register. Most of us would not consider this to be a paper ballot, but it is considered a "paper ballot" by H.R. 811.
However, most of these "ballots" are never counted. Instead the voting machines totals of the electronic ballots are used. The paper strips are used only if there is an audit or recount. Calling this a "paper ballots bill" is misleading.
Recent developments - Secretary Bowen's findings
Secretary of State Debra Bowen commissioned a Top-To-Bottom Review of California voting systems. The findings included:
There are attacks which will work on electronic voting machines despite the presence of a voter verified paper audit trail.
It was easy to bypass the physical security measures installed by the vendors, such as tamper evident seals, without any trace of tampering.
Malicious code planted on Sequoia or Diebold electronic voting machine could infect the central tabulator and change the entire election.
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.
Do the ends justify the means? You decide. E-voting fun...
At the end of this post you can vote, many times, in the MoveOn poll if you are a member or not, though I don't necessarily say that you should. Just as a car gives you the ability to speed over the limit, though nobody say you have to.
I have agreed with much that MoveOn has done in the past. I dislike some of their stances against publishing articles that expose the fact that 9-11 was an inside job. Also the coverage of the widespread (yet mostly unprovable) electronic voter fraud issues in the 2004 elections was very dissappointing. It is my impression that overall, the people behind MoveOn are well-intentioned, but I hope that they follow the links in this article and take the criticisms to heart, because they are making a very serious mistake in supporting and advocating on behalf of this trojan horse that legitimizes secret source code to hide how votes are counted. Additionally the paper is used for recounts only occur when some small margin of victory allows the paper to be used. That condition can be avoided by undetectable vote counting fraud.
Anyway, I expose this simple HTTP URL exploit to help gain attention from Noah Winer and the MoveOn Political Action Committee, so that they can read the opposition arguments for themselves. I am sorry if this ruins any real polling that they want to do to see if members agree or dissagree, but because of the one-sided presentation of HR811, perhaps they don't really care about the informed decisions of their members as much as gaining consent to be a proponent for severely compromised voting "reform". Below is a link that submits a response of "No we should not support HR811, the Holt bill." You can click it repeatedly or perhaps better yet you can change the user ID represented by the seven sixes "6666666" in the URL.
If they get enough votes on the User ID "6666666" from a lot of different IP addresses, then these savvy web masters will easily know that lots of somebodies (or a web virus) are trying to tip the vote scales. If they have slightly more sophisticated controls (probably the other digits following the userID) then they will know that I am a very poor hacker and a bad boy for giving you this web link to abuse.
I am not making you click here or to copy the shortcut and change the "6666666" to other seven digit numbers, but if you do, we can hope that Noah and MoveOn take the time to track this to this web page. Maybe they may even see the errors in their ways.
