RIght Now: There's No Basis for Confidence

RIght Now:  There's No Basis for Confidence in election results.  There wasn't in November of 2006 of course, but few will acknowledge the obvious, except now the NYT, able to put it in positive form, pushes to "Make Democracy Credible" (again).

Except that, one of the main things that makes democracy now incredible is counting the votes invisibly and secretly without any meaningful public supervision and observation.  That will not change.  The meager audit provisions will catch only some mistakes or fraud, if performed vigorously, but it doesn't pass the So What test?  To change a result much more than 3% would have to be audited and a candidate always has to move very fast to file an election contest in most states.  So it is still quite uncertain that a wrongful loser can actually turn the tide.

But an appeal, if the audit turns the tide seems guaranteed.  The theory would be Bush v. gore, just as partial recounts Gore proposed were unconstitutional, these partial audits that do indeed act like recounts and change the election results would be similarly unconstitutional.  So, when it really counts, the Holt audits will certainly fail (in the sense of getting tied up in litigation) and almost certainly give us the wrong result and be struck down as unconstitutional because it treats some voters in some precincts different (with regard to auditing rights) than it does other voters.   And the voters are not being randomly selected either -- precincts vary a lot in size and so voters are treated differently that way, as well.  A United States Supreme Court would have little difficulty appointing George Bush's successor in exactly this way, and Democrats will have to explain, if they support Holt, why they didn't learn anything in the year 2000.

Holt bill

I received this e-mail regarding the Holt bill.  I no longer support it.
 The following groups have come out against the new Holt Bill:

- Black Box Voting

• Open Voting Consortium  
  
• Brad Friedman (BradBlog)  
  
• Jon Bonifaz (VoterAction.org)
  
• Paul Lehto  
  
• Democracy for New Hampshire  

Decline to support:
- John Gideon (VotersUnite, VoteTrustUSA) has publicly refused to support the bill

and there will be more.

HERE'S WHY

1. DECEPTIVE LANGUAGE. Calls a paper TRAIL a paper BALLOT.

2. BILLION DOLLAR UNFUNDED MANDATE: Requires text conversion technology in every polling place. At $7000 per machine for 185,000 polling places, you do the math. See this article for documentation on the billion-dollar boondoggle:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/46649.html
The bill is not talking about scanner wands, folks. Or if it is, they'd better specify that, and soon! Except that apparently, it's too late to make changes.

Note that only two vendors currently manufacture the needed technology, and one (Populex) has as head of its advisory board Frank Carlucci, the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, former CIA director, who was Donald Rumsfeld's roommate in college. Every polling place in America. Is this really what you want? Isn't it time to read the fine print on this???

3. MAKES THE SCANDAL RIDDEN EAC A PERMANENT FIXTURE AND INCREASES ITS POWER. Alan Dechert, from the Open Voting Consortium says it best: "Holt contemplates the invasion of these United States by the Federal government. If passed, it would BREAK the voting system in the states while establishing a dictatorship to handle things: the Election Assistance Commission ("EAC" or just "the Commission") with its four commissioners appointed by the president of the United States." Bradblog on latest EAC scandal: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4119

4. ALLOWS LOSS OF SECRET BALLOTS for the Military

5. NO RECOGNITION OF CITIZEN RIGHT TO OVERSIGHT. Audit provisions do not allow either citizens or candidates access to any records for meaningful audits.

6. CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS -- ie, must have text converters by 2008 and must study how to best do the conversions by 2010.

7. LANGUAGE ON DISCLOSED SOURCE CODE CONTAINS AN ERROR in that it doesn't deal with COTS - meaning, any electronics component with a chip on it would be required to disclose source code. There are literally hundreds of commercial off the shelf components in the system -- printers, video drivers, motherboard components -- that contain firmware, and these are manufactured all over the world. The bill would require Hitachi, Seagate, Fuji, Western Digital to open up their code for their commercial products if used in voting machines. Effectively eliminates the use of electronics while at the same time mandating electronics.

8. MUSH LANGUAGE. (Example: "The manufacturer shall provide the appropriate election official with the information necessary for the official to provide the information...")

9. UNREADABLE: People complain about their legislators not reading the bills -- well the way this is written, it guarantees they won't read it. No Appendix, so sections of the bill require the reader to actually go find a different bill and look up sections in it in order to make sense of the current bill. (example: "Section 301(a)(1) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)(1)) is amended (A) in subparagraph (A)(i), by striking "counted" and inserting "counted, in accordance with paragraphs (2) and (3)");

10. AUDIT PROTOCOLS NO ONE AGREES WITH, even fans of audit solutions

11. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING INTERNET CONNECTIONS for central tabulators and ballot definition software

12. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MANUAL AUDITS TO BE BYPASSED states with computer-only recount protocols

13. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MACHINE COUNT TO SUPERCEDE VOTER VERIFIED PAPER when fuzzily described circumstances arise. Los Angeles Registrar Conny McCormack already has tried to co-opt this (Feinstein senate hearing yesterday) into meaning when there is a printer jam damaging the paper, the machine count will trump.

14. SUPPORTS DREs (Touch-screens and other on-screen voting techniques that are NOT recommended by NIST)

This is a devastating development. So many people worked so very hard on this bill, but in the end it isn't about who worked hard. It's about getting it right. We can't afford another set of HAVA problems.

And if it's got this many problems now, just wait until the lobbyists carve it up.

We're going to have to roll up our sleeves to get what CITIZENS want. More action-oriented, solution-focused information to follow. Black Box Voting is working right now with many other group leaders to brainstorm the best way to deal with this.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting

Paper ballots NOT trails

I have not doubt of the good intentions of Rush Holt and Common Cause.  In reality, however, Holt II offers at best, VERIFIABLE paper trails, and in no way guarantees a paper ballot, let alone one that is VERIFIED.

Both Sec. 2 and Sec. 327 of HR 811 provide loopholes through which unverified machine counts will pass.  Holt II AS WRITTEN is unacceptable.

One hopes the companion bill promised in the Senate will correct significant problems.