From Sarah:
After three hours of testimony yesterday, the Rules Committee recessed without taking any action.
The bill must go through the Rules Committee before it gets to the floor. It's now looking like it might be early next week before there will be a House vote -- so keep up those
calls to your members of Congress!
Many thanks to the thousands of you who have already called.
That was the word from Sarah Dufendach, our chief lobbyist, when the staff got together yesterday to talk about the Holt voting machine bill.
This bill - which Common Cause has been fighting to get passed for at least the past two years - looks like it's coming to the floor on Thursday. That's the good news. The bad news is that there's a chance for the Holt bill opponents to throw a major wrench in the works by adding so-called "poison pill" amendments.
We'll keep you posted - here on the blog, and in your email (you are on
CauseNet, right?). In the meantime, the most important thing you can do is
call your member of Congress and ask him or her to support the Holt bill (HR 811) and oppose any poison pill amendments.
Then
tell us about your call.
This is the moment. We can't afford to have another election with suspect voting machine technology. It's too important. Protect your vote.
Make the call.
Inspired by the Boston Red Sox six-run ninth-inning comeback
for a 6-5 victory on Sunday night--which has nothing to do with this update, we just
wanted to mention it--we bring you the latest in Common Cause news from around
the country.
Here's an update on the fast changing world of election reform.
Florida's House unanimously passed the same bill that passed the Senate and that Governor Crist will sign. Who'd have thought this was possible a year ago! Kudos to the activists in Florida who've fought night and day for years for this.
Word has just come in that the scheduled committee mark-up on HR 811, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessiblity Act of 2007" (AKA the "Holt bill") has been postponed due to next Tuesday, May 8, due to the number of proposed minority amendments. See this
DailyKos comment by Ian Storrar.
Yesterday, the U.S. House voted to ask the GAO to investigate the case of Sarasota's District 13 voting problems. For more, read
The Hill's report.
The Kansas legislature has killed a
Photo ID bill.
And evidence continues to mount in the link between the DOJ U.S. Attorneys Firing scandal and efforts to create a perception of rampant voter fraud, as described in this hard-hitting McClatchy article, "
2006 Missouri's election was ground zero for GOP." I'll end with this juicy quote:
The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider
national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the
Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That
effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale
purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of
liberal get-out-the-vote drives.
Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they've
gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys
ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs
because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud.
They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.
Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter
fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove.
And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.
We at Common Cause think there is a good chance of passing H.R. 811 (The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, introduced by Rep. Holt) and getting it signed into law. This is no small thing.
Do we need technology that makes it possible for language minority voters to cast a ballot in their own language? Yes. Do we need technology that makes it possible for disabled voters to vote independently? Yes. But those voters need to know, too, that their votes will be counted in an audit or recount. They deserve the same protection as all other voters.
While we don't champion DREs, we're not convinced of the accuracy or security of optical scanners, either. Rather than focus on specific technology, Common Cause finds it more useful to zero in on the principles that should drive the choice of technology, such as the use of paper ballots that voters produce or can easily verify, the ability to conduct mandatory random audits using different counting methods such as tabulator and hand-count, the ability to conduct meaningful recounts in close races, and accessibility for use by people with different needs.
If we focus on those principles, then it's clear that H.R. 811 is a step in the right direction.
If you're a student of the history of elections as I am, you know that our nation's election system has been fraught with problems for its entire history (and even before--George Washington bought votes for his House of Burgesses race with casks of rum). Today, our election system is a huge complicated operation with millions of moving parts--think of all those town clerks and volunteer poll workers.
H.R. 811 will significantly improve the security of that system.
Common Blog
