 |
|
Add to My Group
|
November 18, 2006 at 14:22:52
Stopping H.R. 550 Because We Can't Compromise on Democracy by Nancy Tobi Page 1 of 2 page(s) 
|
|
 
|
Following the General Election of 2006, which returned control of the U.S. House and Senate to the Democrats, Common Cause sent a mass email to its members exhorting them to support House Resolution 550, also known as the Holt Bill. H.R. 550 provides for the addition of "paper trails" to electronic voting, provides for audits of 2% or more of the paper trails with discrepancies to be resolved in favor of the paper trail, makes permanent and further strengthens the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), and requires that source code for e-voting machines be disclosed and placed in escrow. Yet Common Cause is DEEPLY wrong about H.R. 550 as a solution to the problems in America's election systems. Citing the Sarasota Florida's now-famous 18,000 undervotes in a disputed Congressional race, they suggest we lobby for H.R. 550 paper trails, yet Sarasotans themselves learned from their experience, blew right past H.R.550's paper trails for touchscreens, and went to paper ballots. If citing Sarasota, why not follow the Sarasotan example and ban touchscreens instead of validating them? Touchscreens make one's own ballot invisible, and at best create a paper trail that studies suggest only 25% of people actually check, and most of those who do check still miss many errors, making errors, fraud and legitimate votes equally "voter-VERIFIED" to use H.R. 550's deceptive terminology. Thus, H.R. 550 paper trails as applied to touchscreens is the gold standard of fraud-approval, allowing 75% and then some to sail through totally unnoticed, but nevertheless earning public confidence. With H.R. 550, Common Cause seems to want to do something "realistic", but these "realistic" Band-Aids don't help; they actually make things worse. In the case of H.R. 550, this is not entirely unsurprising. The legislation, in its first iteration (H.R. 2239), was first proposed in 2003, shortly after the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that it purports to favorably amend, and a lot has happened since then.
The election integrity movement has shown that the technology solutions HAVA foisted on the American public--with the full support of the federal government to the tune of an appropriated $4 billion-- were based on a singularly faulty premise that was not fully disclosed to the American public: the idea that private ownership of elections through proprietary technology and trade secret software has a legitimate place in a truly democratic election system, and that the safekeeping of our ballots and the counting of our votes should be outsourced to private corporate interests who claim the Constitution is inapplicable to them as private actors, rather than held in the hands of our American communities and overseen by local citizens.
This premise of HAVA, that secret vote counting and privatization of elections and removal of public oversight is somehow OK, flies in the face of one of the most widely held political values ever measured. This political value is the 92% of the American public which support, as measured in an August 2006 Zogby poll, the right of the public to witness vote counting and obtain information about vote counting: the necessities of public oversight of elections. That HAVA is trying to make this sacred democratic value extinct is the brewing scandal of the century in elections.
Because it questioned this faulty premise, the citizens' election integrity movement was able to uncover many other holes in the approach taken by HAVA.
The movement discovered that HAVA undermined community-centered, paper ballot-based voting systems, along with transparency in elections. It discovered that by giving primacy to technology, HAVA spawned a myriad of voter suppression nightmare scenarios: (1) voters waiting hours in bottlenecked lines because there weren't enough expensive e-voting machines in their polling stations (2) Voters being handed provisional ballots, many of which were never counted, because their names had been stripped from the HAVA-mandated computerized voting registration systems, and (3) Voters stripped of their ability to understand the basics of election vote counting due to the complexity of computerization even if the software were not secret.
The movement discovered that the HAVA-created Election Assistance Commission effectively hands oversight of the nation's elections squarely to the Oval Office and the Executive Branch, causing a dangerous shift in the balance of governmental powers. This shift takes a sharp turn away from the time-honored system of checks and balances necessary for election integrity, and toward the dangerous precedent of consolidating the power of incumbents to control the terms and circumstances of their own re-election in unhealthy ways.
And the movement also discovered, with astonishment and sadness but not surprise, that HAVA was largely written and funded by lobbyists working for an industry for whom profit trumped patriotism. It should go without saying that elections are to be utterly neutral, and the need for accuracy and transparency and checks and balances should not be limited by profitability concerns. Indeed, state Supreme Courts have observed that the integrity of our Republic is only as strong as the integrity of our elections, and sometimes doing the right thing involves falling on a sword that a for-profit entity may not wish to fall on.
Rather than taking into account these lessons, H.R. 550 continued to build on the false premises of HAVA, and as a result, H.R. 550, if passed as written, now promises to become HAVA II, building an even more expensive and elaborate superstructure on top of an undemocratic foundation that is radically hostile to the public's right to supervise its own elections and be a watchdog on the only mechanism of power and money transfer to government: elections.
H.R. 550's defects are stated below in brief form.
Paper Trails Can't Work
H.R. 550 calls for "paper trails" and "verified voting". Paper trails might be paper ballots, but H.R. 550 still allows for machine-produced records rather than voter-produced ballots. Paper trails can not work to protect American democracy. Placing technology, as opposed to the tried and true paper ballot, as the start and end of the voting system, H.R. 550 invites the e-voting industry to open its palms for the federal handout to pay for the development of printing "add-ons" to its already substandard product, at around $1000 per printer.
Printing technology solutions provided in 2006 to many jurisdictions around the nation have already failed to deliver on this promise. The printers jam, the paper records can not be used effectively in any kind of a recount, and then there is always the question of the software that programs the machine and its printer. In black box technology, we never really know if what is printed out on a paper trail is what has actually been recorded and counted inside the e-voting machine's bits and bytes, and there's no way to guarantee the two are in fact the same. Under H.R. 550, the electronic ballot is always still the first ballot counted, and in almost all cases is the only ballot ever counted (barring a recount or 2% audit).
When voters mark their ballots by hand, they know exactly where they are making their marks, and,through the experience of marking the ballot, they express their political will and intent without having to look back and "verify" a second time that what they have marked reflects their intent.
Legislation like H.R. 550 supplants definite visible indelible ballots with the notion of indefinite "verifiable" paper trails, or trails "able to be verified" instead of those that most certainly are verified (paper ballots). But voters do not inspect paper trails at rates greater than 25% or so, just as customers in grocery stores don't typically inspect the secondary paper receipt handed to them by the teller after electronic entry of the prices. In fact, studies that show that even when voters do check the paper, they don't catch most of the errors, so the true rate of "error approval" when paper trails are used is significantly higher than 75%.
The verified paper trail directly causes false voter confidence and tells the election hacker that at least 75% of his hacks and more will get through and further get the Good Hacker Seal of Approval by the misleadingly 'verified' paper trails themselves! This has got to keep the hackers and riggers laughing as they prepare for Election Day in e-voting jurisdictions!
1 | 2
Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
No Compromise on Democracy: Oppose H.R. 550
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
www.democracyfornewhampshire.com
Nancy Tobi is co-founder, former Chair, and website editor for Democracy for New Hampshire (DFNH). She is also a founder and Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee. Nancy is the author of numerous articles on election integrity, including "The (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
 Contact Author |
Contact Editor |
 View Authors' Articles |
|
|
| 7 comments |
|
Out with the Trojan Horse
Should we be surprised Common Cause supports the Holt bill? CC, along with most other mainstream "progressive" organizations, champions publicly financed campaigns as their major strategy for cleaning up elections. CC continues to ignore the elephant in the voting booth - electronic voting systems. Maybe someone can reach thru Chellie's denial; no one from Ohio has been able to. All other reforms needed for an honest election in this country are useless as long as we record or count ballots electronically, for the reasons you both explain above. Hopefully, activists will forward your article link to their own email lists. by Rady Ananda (182 articles, 374 quicklinks, 49 diaries, 1718 comments [201 recommended, 2 rejected]) on Monday, Nov 20, 2006 at 2:03:30 PM  (0+)
|
|
The answer is already out there
In an article re-printed in a local paper yesterday, a column by Bill Bradbury, special to The Washington Post, states that Oregon, with their Vote-By-Mail program had a "turnout" of 70%, with every signature verified and with a fail-safe paper trail. Ballots are mailed in advance, (not forwardable to anyone who has moved), and may be completed and mailed regardless of weather, which leads to record voter participation and satisfaction and costs about 30% less than polling place elections. As usual, the answer to a problem is so simple that the "intellectuals" view it with scorn. If people discover how much common sense can contribute to the common good, politicians will once again become redundant. by Mary Pitt (77 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 282 comments [11 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Tuesday, Nov 21, 2006 at 6:46:22 PM (0+)
|
|
Reply: Why should we trust tha mail in ballots are COUNTED as cast?
Why should one trust that mail-in votes are counted as cast when those paper mail-in ballots are then scanned and counted by optiscan machines loaded with hackable memory cards which are then transferred into an equally hackable central tabulator computer? All the counting takes place beyond public view (inside a computer) - even if you go to the RoV HQ to watch the process, all you see is someone feeding ballots into a scanner, or sitting at a computer terminal. You have no way to know whether the numbers that the computer generates are accurate, and no way to verify them. Mail-in voting has some good points, it's convenient, encourages better turnout, and more thoughtful voting, etc. But there's NO reason to trust that the vote totals are accurate as long as computerized machines are doing the tabulation. The mail-in ballots, AND hand marked paper ballots at each precinct, should be hand counted, in public, by teams of citizens with plenty of observers. Please read this link from Bev Harris about all the vulerabilities that currently exist with mail-in ballots: click here Take a moment to watch these great videos of people hand counting paper ballots at the precincts in New Hampshire (they could do the same thing at RoV HQ with the mail-in ballots). http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/2648 If a full hand-count of all hand marked paper ballots seems impossible to contemplate, here is an excellent 10% hand-count plan by IT professional Bruce O'Dell. This UPS system (Universal Precinct-based Ballot Sample)calls for a 10% hand count of all paper ballots at each precinct conducted by the public on election night. (The same UPS system would be used for mail-in ballots.) He has demonstrated that the process must be conducted at every precinct and that the sample must be at least 10% in order to have any strong possibility of detecting fraud. click here by my2cents (0 articles, 5 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 30 comments) on Friday, Nov 24, 2006 at 1:18:14 AM (0+)
|
|
Excellent
I'm forwarding this article to everyone on my list. We have to stop falling for the cheap fix because it's supposedly "realistic." We can't afford to lose on this one. I'm going to write a letter to the editor on the subject today. by Patricia Goldsmith (26 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 17 comments) on Wednesday, Nov 22, 2006 at 11:37:57 AM (0+)
|
|
The path to Hell is paved...
The House Resolution 550 means well, but as Nancy Tobi points out, it's just more of the same HAVA. Get it straight, folks- HAVA is the biggest scam the Republicans have ever foisted off on the American people. It needs to be rooted out entirely, which can be done only by your congress critters. So, using the "mail to a friend", e-mail this article to your House and Senate representatives, which can be found at: www.pfaw.org/ You might even consider e-mailing all those well meaning organizations who are wrongly supporting H.R. 550 and get them to do the same. Swamping them with e-mails does work - just ask Our new Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid. He started to sing a completely different song after CodePink got him on the right page. by Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments) on Saturday, Dec 23, 2006 at 8:54:17 AM (0+)
|
|
H.R. 550 v. H.R. 6200
Dear Ms. Tobi: I'm a big fan of yours and I'm sure that you're very busy but you need to know that there's a big push for everybody to sign a petition to support H.R. 550. By big, I mean 37 organizations, three of which I'm still nominally a member of. I was unaware that they supported this screwball resolution but it's become serious. I'll do my part and e-mail them your URL article, along with a suggestion that they endorse H.R. 6200 instead but if you were to write another article comparing the two it would be much better. I don't want anybody feeling sancimonious about saving the hackable op-scans. Thanks, Chuck Garner by Chuck Garner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 118 comments) on Saturday, Dec 23, 2006 at 5:41:07 PM (0+)
|
|
"Screwball Resolution" is right
To call HR 550 a "screwball resolution" is generous, Diogenes(1). It really helps identify who the real reformers are in this country, by listening to how much drivel is spoken about this yet more severe Trojan Horse, by those who are not (real). Instead of rectifying HAVA, probably the one piece of legislation alive in the world that most needs rectifying, it enshrines it. That's the message we need to get out, and we'll have to do it in spite of Hillary and Chellie, not with their help. Has anyone noticed that they have been slipping in one Trojan Horse after another, all the while posing as Democrats, or reformers. Forget Hillary's disastrous handling of public health care, something that made me shriek with terror when I heard Bill in his first State of the Union letting us know she was the designated driver for drunken insurance overlords, just look at some of the recent things they've espoused. Hillary is an even bigger hawk than Kerry, and both should be tried as war criminals just for that alone ( sounds like vitriol, I know, but I'm really just trying to draw people's attention to the fact these gals ain't what they seem to be, in lieu of any help from MSM ). And Chellie's franchise in California sent us a few months ago urgent email upon urgent email begging us to "Help Arnold Re-district California." Taking the job of districting from the hands of long-standing incumbents and giving it to a panel of 9 "judges." You gotta be kidding. One activist that wrote me here in CA while we both tried to alert the hills, bays, and coves of the Golden State, said the most relevant thing about that plan, "What have they been smoking?" Apparently, the green stuff they have in such abundance has something in it much like hemp. There's no other explanation: Republicans just spend or hoard our billions of "greenback," but "Democrats" like Hillary smoke it. ( The signs all point to "inhalation," also. ) But, to return to Kansas, from Oz, we need to circulate to ALL our lists the kind of arguments made here by Tobi and Lehto, and make sure as many hear about these truths as possible: and that means A to Z, which is how we've been getting the word out and the job done: from editors, to congressmen, to pastors, to the police (I've even done that, and find a surprising amount of agreement from some of them, recently), to ROVs and BOEs, to schools, election workers, activist organizations, and every man and woman on the street. Comprehensively, we must spread the word about HR 6200, and what an "unmitigated disaster" in the making is this little fifth column assault upon our country: HR 550. ~JE by muservin (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 78 comments [5 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Thursday, Dec 28, 2006 at 6:39:07 PM (0+)
|
Want to post your own comment on this Article? 
|
||||
|
||||||||||||||
Must Read (0) 
Well Said (0) 
News (0) 
Touching (0) 
Funny (0) 
Supported (0) 
Interesting (0) 
Inspiring (0) 
Valuable (0)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tell a Friend:
|
Copyright © 2002-2009, OpEdNews |
