In complete opposition to his original bill,this new version requires NON-disclosure of election software.It provides trade secret protection to the private corporations and their anonymous employees who are programming the software counting our votes.It completely and historically removes public access to an open vote count.No legislation is better than bad legislation. Holt's bill is downright dangerous to our republic.

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This is the final portion of my interview with voting rights activist, Nancy Tobi.  

Initially, the Holt bill had more uniform support among the election integrity community. What happened, Nancy? 

Unfortunately, since 2003, Mr. Holt and his suggested legislation have gone through a number of transformations. As a result he has damaged his position as "the Congressional election reform leader", and his legislation is no longer supportable.

Each legislative session since 2003, Holt has introduced a new version of his bill. 

The second version had jumped from the simple 5-pager-no-holds-barred-nothing-concealed original bill to a 60+ page piece of legislation containing all sorts of unpalatable and obscure provisions.

I say that Mr. Holt himself went through a transformation because the goals of his new legislation were so completely different and, in fact, oppositional, to his earlier very worthy goals, that it appears that some sort of personal transformation must have occurred. But that is for him and his conscience to consider.

Where it affects the rest of us is this: with his first 2003 bill, HR2239, Holt established himself as the go-to man on the Hill for those citizens sincerely interested in positive election reform. With Holt on the election reform throne, so to speak, nobody seems interested or willing to challenge him, and his legislative efforts are now presented as gospel by citizens, the media, and his colleagues on the Hill alike.

Can you give an example of this from personal experience? 

Yes, I can. I met with my NH Congressman, Paul Hodes, a couple of years ago to ask him not to support that year's version of the Holt Bill. The bill was so complex and its language so obfuscated that it was difficult to distill the main oppositional points down to a one-page briefing. 

Nonetheless, I did so, but I also provided Mr. Hodes with supporting documentation to explain the issues more deeply. 

Following that meeting, Mr. Hodes' senior NH staffer, Mary Beth Walz, berated me for providing "too much information" to Hodes, whose time, she advised me, was valuable. And on top of everything, she called me to task for asking my freshman Congressman to oppose the man she called "the election reform guru of Capital Hill", a man in Mr. Hodes's own political party, a man with leadership clout.

Sure enough, not two weeks after I met with my Congressman, Mr. Hodes, he signed on as a sponsor to Holt's bill, citing, as he put it, his ability to "meet behind closed doors" and address the issues of concern I had raised to him. Needless to say, none of the issues were addressed in that bill either behind or outside of closed doors.

That must have been disappointing.

As the Founders must have said somewhere along the way, government must be the rule of law and not of man. The Cult of Holt is now standing in our way to move forward as a true citizens' movement. And the Cult of Holt becomes an obstacle in Washington too, where party loyalty and access to power become more important than constituent representation.

Unfortunately, I believe at this point we need to deconstruct the halo from Mr. Holt and either find a new champion for voting rights on the Hill, or hold Holt's feet to the fire long enough and hard enough until he finds his way back to the more honest and beneficial election reform stance where he started from.

No legislation is perfect.  Many believe that the current Holt bill (HR 2894) is the best we're likely to get. Do you disagree? Just what's so bad?

So, back to your original question about why everyone can't get behind Holt's bill now. Well, there is a division in the citizens' movement that starts with the Holt Halo effect but then runs much deeper into a real division regarding our goals.

Some people say that "something is better than nothing" and they latch onto the paper record component of Holt's bill, which calls for paper records for  touchscreen machines (similar to his original idea) and then also calls for the phasing out of these touchscreens after the next presidential election.

Lots of patriot activists living in states like Maryland, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, would give their eyeteeth to get rid of those machines. So they are lobbying for Holt bill passage.

The problem is that this little paper record teaser in the bill pales in significance when you consider the provisions in the legislation that are so dangerous to the American Republic. Provisions like handing control of our elections to the White House and making concealed vote counting the law of the land.

So my answer is "No. Something is not better than nothing." I mean, if I cut my knee I can certainly ask to have it amputated to eliminate the wound. But is that what I really want in the end? 

Didn't we learn anything from the Patriot Act?

Can you elaborate a bit on what you think is so dangerous about this legislation?

There are so many troubling aspects to this bill that I do think of it as the Patriot Act for elections. We are being promised election security at the cost of our democratic freedoms.

I can give you a quick and dirty list of the really damaging and dangerous aspects of the bill:

First of all, in complete opposition to his original bill, this new version requires NON-disclosure of election software. It provides trade secret protection to the private corporations and their anonymous employees who are programming the software counting our votes. It completely and historically removes public access to an open vote count.

I hesitate to go on with my list because this #1 issue is so dangerous in and of itself; I want people to really think about what it means. It means government-sanctioned concealed vote counting controlled by private corporations and government insiders to the exclusion of public oversight.

It's a pretty simple concept after all. We've heard the media and politicians complain about this in the Ukraine, in Venezuela, and, lately, in Iran.

I think the main point to remember is that this bill is just an expansion of HAVA, which was already a terrible blow to our democratic elections. It has nothing to do with voting rights, civil rights, or open government. 

No legislation is better than bad legislation. And Holt's bill is not just bad legislation; it is downright dangerous to the American Republic. I urge all Americans to oppose it.

Thank you for walking us through the Holt Bill, Nancy. Now our readers will understand the clear and present danger the bill presents to our increasingly fragile democracy.

***

Part one of my interview with Nancy

Part two of my interview with Nancy 

Authors Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html

Authors Bio:

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.



Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.


When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.

While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"


Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.