Last week, as a large crowd of dedicated activists converged on Capitol Hill to lobby House Members to support H.R. 550, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, a confusing message was heard from one of the pioneers in the fight against unverifiable voting systems.

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.

Yesterday afternoon, MoveOn sent out an email to its members, extolling the success of last week's Lobby Days and inviting members to contribute a small amount to Common Cause to support our campaign to pass a federal bill that would require voter verified paper ballots, random audits, accessible voting machines, and publicly disclosed voting machine software. (As you know, we use Representative Rush Holt's excellent bill, HR 550, as the model for this federal legislation.)

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."

I am sitting in a room in the Rayburn building, surrounded by some of the activists who have been pounding the halls in the Congress, talking to their representatives about supporting HR 550.

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."

Already, after the first day of lobbying, three new Democrats [ED: make that six Democrats by the end of the day on Friday] and three new Republicans have signed on to HR 550. We expect many more to follow today and in the weeks to come. These people, who came in from all around the country on their own dime, are amazing -- well informed, articulate, and totally committed. It is an honor to work with them. And they are having a blast. "This is by far the most effective political activity I have ever participated in," Carolyn Fuller of Cambridge, Mass., told me. I have to agree.

On Thursday, hundreds of activists from around the country will gather in Washington, D.C., to lobby their congressional representatives in support of Rep. Rush Holt's H.R. 550, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005.

But in recent days, there has been some talk on the Internet that H.R. 550 is a flawed bill that will make the problems of elections worse, instead of improving them.

Pam Smith of VerifiedVoting.org has written a very complete and articulate rebuttal to this information. Here are two excerpts.

"Does HR550 Allow for Paper Ballots? The article implies that the Holt bill calls for a "direct recording electronic (DRE) machine + voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) printer" solution, which it does not. Nothing in HR550 precludes any town, county or state from using a paper ballot system, as such a system is inherently voter-verifiable. "

"In Holt's HR550, there is a specified percentage for the mandatory manual accuracy check... it is not intended to be a "limited recount" a la Gore v. Bush. HR550 mandates random audits in at least 2% of the precincts in each State, including at least one per county. The EAC may not pick and choose where it will conduct audits, nor of how great or small a portion of the state. What's more, the States may not select where those audits can be, and will not know where they will take place until after the initial vote tallies are done and reported. The bill insists that all precincts in a State "have an equal chance of being selected."

To read the entire rebuttal, go to http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.ph p?id=6348.

Common Cause is among the organizations sponsoring the lobbying efforts this Thursday and Friday. We believe that the Holt bill will help solve many of the problems causing voters to worry that their votes will not be counted as cast.