Here's an update from Susannah Goodman, who spent the afternoon in the committee room:

Hooray!  I just came back from the House Longworth building where the House Administration Committee passed an amended version of HR 811, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 out of the Committee by vote of 6 to 3.

A HUGE THANK YOU to all of you who have supported this effort with your calls, letters, articles, editorials, thoughts and words and financial support.  THIS IS YOUR VICTORY.  There is no way we could have gotten this far without you!

Although we still have a long way to go - the bill still needs to pass the House Floor and then needs to go through the whole process in the Senate - this is a great start.  This is a great day for verifiable elections.

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You may not read Roll Call ("The newspaper of Capitol Hill") every day, but there are people who do: members of Congress and their staff. Today's Roll Call includes two excellent opinion pieces, one an editorial and the other an OpEd by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Here's what Ornstein says about Congress and elections:

And here's a juicy quote from today's Roll Call editorial:

For the entire text of the editorial, click here. For Ornstein's OpEd, click here. (Access to Roll Call requires login.)

According to VerifiedVoting.org and the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, in 2004 only 10 states had passed requirements that voting systems produce voter verifiable paper records - covering only 27% of registered voters. Today, 27 states have passed requirements that their voting systems produce voter verifiable paper records, covering almost 55% of registered voters. In addition, eight states and a number of counties have simply done the right thing and purchased voting systems which automatically produce paper records, bringing the total to over 65%.

Together we can reach our goal to have all voting machines produce paper records and have every state mandate an audit of those records.

Several states that are trying to introduce electronic voting machines to their electoral process are being challenged in the courts.

Per USA Today:

We've already seen difficulties with state primaries held in March in Texas and Illinois, and more and more counties are discounting the use of electronic ballots as unreliable and unsafe.

What's it going to take for officials everywhere to realize that a voter-verifiable paper ballot is the only good solution?

Bev Harris of Black Box Voting published an article claiming that HR 550 would do more harm than good, and that those dedicated activists who paid their own way to Washington to lobby members of Congress were "insiders" who, according to Harris, are prone to all sorts of nefarious behavior.

Not surprisingly, foes of verifiable elections, or perhaps I should say, proponents of DREs, have joined Harris's cry. One notable example is Dan Tokaji of Ohio State, who trumpeted Harris's article in his blog yesterday.

Harris and Tokaji (and probably anyone else who wants to see fair, accurate, and accountable elections) have one thing right: the most important ingredient for election reform is transparency. However, as I see it, voter verified paper ballots are the only way to create transparency at this point in time.

A black box of any kind by definition is not transparent. Therefore, a DRE that produces no independent record checked by the voter is totally opaque. Will paper solve all the ills around our voting systems? Of course not. But how can we audit machines if we have nothing to compare the machine-produced totals against?

One summer during college, I worked in the bookkeeping department of The Big Banana in Gilford, New Hampshire. I did a lot of auditing of vendors' bills, and I always had receipts to check against the invoices. The rule was, no receipts, no payment. There's a reason for that; it's called verifiability.

And Tokaji's complaints about the quality of the technology producing the paper ballots are specious. We proponents of the voter verified paper ballot in no way suggest that curly, flimsy, thermal paper is the way to go. (In fact, many of us prefer optical scan machines, which use paper ballots filled out by the voter.) But we are at the mercy of the machine vendors, who never cease to surprise us with their ineptitude.

Harris is just plain wrong that we activists (including those from Common Cause) are not lobbying against secrecy. And Tokaji, who was active in Common Cause for many years, most recently as a member of our National Governing Board, shouldn't have let her get away with that one. He knows that openness and transparency are two of our main goals; we've fought for them for 35 years.

In the end, I think that Harris and the supporters of H.R. 550 have more in common than she admits. And we all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Harris for her ground-breaking investigations. But in this case, I can't figure out her point. if HR 550 does not pass -- as she and Tokaji seem to be urging -- then there will be no mandatory requirement for voter verified paper records in 24 states, and no mandatory requirement for independent audits in 38 states (according to electionline.org, only 12 states have audit provisions ). Why would Bev Harris choose to have 12 states with partial independent auditing over a bill that would require all 50 states to have partial independent auditing?

Making good progress toward fixing election problems is not the same as using a too-weak antibiotic, as Harris claims. After all, elections aren't infections. They're merely the foundation of our democracy.

P.S. You can see Representative Rush Holt's rebuttal here.

We are very pleased to accept MoveOn's support of our work. The plan to pass legislation is comprehensive and will require both money and the energy of dedicated activists around the country.

While MoveOn cited Common Cause in this effort, the work completed to-date on the campaign to pass a federal bill modeled on HR 550 has been done by a broad coalition of nonpartisan groups. Lobby Days was put together by the ICount Coalition. VerifiedVoting, VoteTrustUSA, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Working Assets, and VotersUnite all brought members to Capitol Hill, as did Common Cause. We very much look forward to working with all these groups as the campaign goes forward; they are an integral part of the plan. Their experience, commitment, and expert technical knowledge are invaluable.

It's going to take all of us working together to achieve success. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of unlimited time. We truly have to "get it straight by 2008."

They are filling out the reports that they write after each visit (we've scheduled more than 100 constituent visits during the two days of lobbying). Here are a few random excerpts:

"Seemed very receptive; said she had received emails/letters on the bill from consituents."

"We all left feeling pretty good. Very receptive to our three main points (audit, papercounts, disclosed source code)..."

"Started off by saying his member was very positive about paper trails so he wouldn't be a hard sell."