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April 20, 2007
Two Compelling Reasons To Resist the Holt Bill
By andi novick
There are many reasons to fight against the passage of the Holt Bill, but these two are enough to make you wonder why anyone would vote for it.
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TWO COMPELLING REASONS TO RESIST THE HOLT BILL:
THE HOLT BILL SECURES SECRET VOTE COUNTING AS WELL AS THE AGGRANDIZEMENT OF FEDERAL CONTROL OVER OUR ELECTIONS
1) Our Right to be self-governing cannot be surrendered or compromised:
The fundamental right of a democracy is quite simply government by the people, of the people, and for the people. Rights are not negotiable. They are absolute. The democratic experiment was designed to reverse the history of tyranny wherein rulers held rights and people held only privileges granted by those rulers. In this new democracy, the people would hold the rights and the government,servant to the People, would be granted the privileges that could be revoked by the People.
The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone. – James Madison.
Our vote is the means by which we exercise that authority over our public servants - the government. The people are masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it! — Abraham Lincoln
It should go without saying that since elections are our mechanism for asserting our authority, the people are the only ones who must have authority over their own elections. Once we permit the servant-government to control the counting of the vote, as we have under HAVA, We the People can no longer insure the integrity of our votes and cannot expect to remain self-governing.
The Founders recognized:
Even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. – Thomas Jefferson.
This has now come to pass. We were not asked if we would surrender our right to control the single means by which we preserve our independence, it was decided for us. Our votes are now counted secretly by machines. We can no longer supervise the counting of our votes, the government having handed that function over to private voting machine companies. The government, under HAVA, has stolen our right to control our own elections and hence our ability to hold the government as a servant to the People.
The Declaration of Independence provided that our inalienable rights should be secured by the government: The very government which has decided it alone will determine how the votes that elect it are to be counted. We the People are now shut out of the process and have lost the means to effectuate our Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
2) HR 811 authorizes the expansion of executive power: The Holt Bill proposes to make permanent and to fund the scandal-ridden Election Assistance Commission (EAC), which was supposed to sunset under HAVA.
For as long as HAVA has forced us to vote on these computerized voting machines, those responsible for the testing and certification of these machines have made sure that accountability for the functioning of the machines would be non-existent. First as members of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), charged with control, selection and oversight of the voting machine test labs, as well as members of the Election Center - a group which actively colluded with the voting machine industry to convince the public to accept these machines - Donetta Davidson, now Chair of the EAC, and Thomas Wilkey, now Executive Director of the EAC, have been there creating the appearance that these machines are tested, certified and secure. This is our EAC! See A Return to Sanity – Why We must Eliminate Computerized Control of Our Election System, http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_070225_a_return_to_sanity__96.htm & Halting Holt, http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_070322_halting_holt_thought.htm
We should no longer be surprised that people who fail to perform are those who are rewarded and promoted. That is how this Administration perceives the role of government.
The question is why does the Holt Bill want to institutionalize the EAC?
We have seen how federal agencies are consistently used to deceive the American public:
"government has been obscuring the state of our knowledge by exaggerating the level of uncertainty in global warming science." http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/federal-climate-scientists.htmlFDA scientists "have been asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or their conclusions in a FDA scientific document." http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/fda-scientists-pressured.html "Scientists in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they've been forced to alter or withhold findings that would have led to greater protections for endangered species....to follow the Bush administration's political policies." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/10/MNG7QB8O531.DTL Why aren't supporters of HR811 afraid that handing over control of our elections to another federal commission, hand picked by the President, would result in more distortions of evidence, more misleading of the public and further distractions from the truth – that elections are being massively stolen? They should be! Yesterday's New York Times revealed that the EAC suppressed expert reports which had disclosed there was little "voter fraud" around the nation. The EAC then altered the official report for political purposes to reflect the Bush Administration's claims rather than their own panel's findings. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todaysheadlines/. This of course is just a small part of the plan to distract from the real theft of elections by focusing on "voter fraud" - people who commit individual acts of fraud- a non existent problem used to divert attention from the real fraud - "election fraud", which involves the exclusion of mass numbers of voters using DREs and Optical Scanners. We already know that federal prosecutors were fired for refusing to cooperate in the government's witch hunt against "voter fraud". (See, Voter Fraud and Federal Prosecutors - The Long Road to Democracy, http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php? p=opedne_michael__070319_voter_fraud_and_fede.htm). And by falsely claiming "voter fraud", not only can the government distract the People from the real crime of "election fraud", but they've created their own justification for increased voter suppression tactics, like voter identification laws. All this, while using our tax dollars to deceive us!