Action du jour - Halt Holt!
It’s time to move from “must-read” to “must-do.”
The action? Faxing or phoning your Congressperson by this Monday, April 16, urging him/her to oppose the Holt bill, H.R. 811, formally known as the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accountability Act of 2007.”
How can this be? MoveOn and Common Cause are supporting it. There are 200 cosponsors of the bill. Why aren’t I and countless other election integrity activists supporting it? Because it’s flawed, too flawed to support. I understand this is an uphill battle.
What do we have on our side?
A. We’ve done our homework. A cursory check of the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) website (link below) will convince you that we aren’t a bunch of lightweights.
B. Election officials are protesting passage of the bill, as revealed in The Hill, Election officials predict chaos, protest reform bill, published April 12, 2007.
Most of you know that I’ve been involved in election integrity since January of 2004. I consider halting Holt as one of the most important tasks for all citizens who care about transparent and accurate elections.
To make it easy for you to get informed and take action, a handful of people at ElectionDefenseAlliance.org have worked incredibly hard to assemble everything you need. If you only have time to go to one page, I recommend Action Alert. Thanks to Dan Ashby, a co-founder of EDA, you’ll find a well-organized page that will describe reasons to oppose H.R. 811 plus links to what you need to send a message by fax, phone or e-mail to your representative.
If you have a little more time, go to Why the Election Assistance Commission Must Be Abolished by the amazing Nanci Tobi of DemocracyforNewHampshire.com. H.R. 811 will give the EAC, whose members are appointed by the White House, permanent control over voting system technologies and standards.
I wish I could ask you to just trust me that the Holt bill is flawed and that your help is needed to stop it. However, since there are so many mighty forces united in support of it, I don’t expect you take my word. I just hope that you care enough that you’ll take a few minutes to get informed and a few more minutes to take action.
2 comments:
Holt II permits the continued use of touch screen voting. Has an ineffective audit. Has a huge loophole (Sec. 327) permitting states to bypass any audit. Underfunds "text conversion" (probably a bad idea in itself) by $750 million. Worst of all, it makes permanent the EAC, a commission comprised only of White House appointees.
CASE supports Holt, but ONLY with fixes to the items noted above. That is, we do NOT support Holt as written.
MoveOn is unintentionally working against the interests of progressives.
One of the trickier issues is the audit. The Holt bill requires too few audits, which could be a result of input from elections officials who don't like having to conduct the audits.
However, statisticians say that an audit of fewer than 10 percent won't catch fraud.
In this case the audit requirement needs to reflect what is required to catch fraud, not to appease elections officials whose interest is mainly to certify an election as quickly as possible--regardless of any mistakes. In fact, I would deem the audit requirement the most important fix.
Janie
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