Reasons to Reject and Replace the Holt HR 811 Bill on Voting Integrity

There's no doubt that the concensus among the leaders of the Voting Integrity activist community is that the Holt bill is a lost cause. It has been weakened, diluted and poked full of so many holes that it is a bad bill. The word is that the wagons have been circled around the bill, probably by Holt's staff, and Rush Holt is not interested in fixing what so many say is broken.

There are some who say otherwise. One group consists of some computer experts-- many who have multi-million dollar grants to study the safety and efficacy of computer voting. Some are former presidents and founders of computer societies. These individuals have, what I believe to be insurmountable conflicts of interest. And perhaps I am being kind, since there are plenty of computer experts who are clear that computerized voting as it now exists, and as it is proposed to be done in the Holt bill, is dangerous to democracy and cannot be fixed with additions of printers.

There's another group-- a small one-- of voting integrity activists who believe that the best political strategy is to "settle" for the flawed, inadequate Holt bill as better than nothing. This approach is generally seen as a misjudgment which would allow some disturbing policies to become federal law. They think the thing to do is to let these dangerous policies become federalized and then to change them. Most of us who oppose the Holt bill see this as naive wishful thinking.

It is absolutely essential that a solid law regulating elections be put in place which applies to the 2008 presidential elections and preferably, the primaries too.

Draft legislative verbiage has already been written.

Now, I'm not one of the experts-- an activist, yes. But not an expert. I've started this article so that in the comments section, election integrity experts can, in one place, post their understanding of why the Holt Bill must be rejected, so it can be used as a single link for local activism.

I encourage the experts to post your reasons, and links to other articles that go into greater detail. But don't just post the links, Make sure to summarize the issues and reasons here.

The good news is, the word is getting out.

as an additional resource, here's something at OpEdNews-- "a tag cloud" that will soon be viewable as part of our multi-view directory system. Our article submission system removes the font differences that the cloud includes. To get a preview of what the cloud display and the new directory system will look like, though it's not yet finished and the whole directory has not been completely shifted over from the old table of contents, click here for a look: Directory   

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