Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ), who's worked for several years to get a bill passed in Congress ensuring that voters can verify their votes on paper, and that those paper ballots are counted in mandatory audits and recounts. Today, HR 811, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, is getting close to passage.

A number of advocates who you think would cheer this development have turned instead to attacking it. Some of them are simply opposed to the federal government mandating how state elections should be run. Others are disappointed that the bill doesn't immediately outlaw DREs for the 2008 election. (What it does do is mandate that by November, 2008, every voter will have the chance to verify his or her vote on a paper ballot, and it ensures that every state will use that paper ballot in mandatory random audits. Without passage of HR 811, some 35 million voters will have to vote on paperless machines, and very few states will conduct audits.)

Have we seen the tipping point for Congress? President Bush's commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence -- soon to be a pardon, based on signals coming from the president -- while anticipated, still seems incredible. We've gone from a president who promised to seek out and fire anyone responsible for the illegal exposure of a CIA covert agent to a president who is letting one of his own advisors and the assistant to the vice president off the hook after being convicted by a jury of creating enough obfuscation around the case to essentially stymie the investigation. It seems clear that Libby was the designated fall guy. If he kept his mouth shut, he would be protected. And the fact is, he did keep his mouth shut. Although the vice president was clearly implicated during the investigation and trial, Libby's artfully forgetful testimony ensured that the vice president would escape prosecution.

In 1973, President Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox to protect himself from having to release the Watergate tapes (which incriminated him and his staff). Cox had this to say at the time:
Here at Common Cause, we are proud to say that Archie Cox was on our National Governing Board for a quarter of a century, and was its chair from 1980 to 1992. In honor of his memory and on behalf of the American people, for the sake of our democracy on Independence Day, Congress should thoroughly investigate not only the case of the "outing of Valerie Plame" but the entire trail of lies that led our country into an ill-conceived and tragically costly war with Iraq.

It may not be convenient for Congress to undertake such a task now, but our elected representatives must remember that the United States' democracy and laws are not ours by convenience -- as those who signed the Declaration of Independence would readily attest.

This afternoon, Senator Feinstein introduced legislation to address the risk posed by paperless electronic voting machines, which are still deployed in 18 states. Feinstein's bill, The Ballot Integrity Act of 2007, will require voting systems to produce voter verified paper records. In the event of a machine breakdown, votes will not be lost and voters are not disenfranchised.

Common Cause applauds Senator Feinstein for her effort to correct these grave problems. Unfortunately, her legislation does not require states to change their voting systems in time for the 2008 presidential election. More than 35 million voters will vote on unverifiable, unauditable, paperless voting machines in 2008 if this is not corrected.

In 2000, this country experienced an election meltdown. In every federal election since, we have suffered through equipment malfunctions, administrative snafus, partisan manipulation, and more.

One of the biggest and most easily corrected threats to the integrity of our elections is the use of paperless electronic voting machines (DREs). These machines do not allow a voter to verify that her vote will be counted accurately, nor do they allow their totals to be checked through an acceptable audit procedure. Computer scientists in major universities across the country have decried the machines' lack of security. Yes, votes cast on these machines are hackable.

New Jersey Representative Rush Holt introduced a bill in May of 2003 that would have corrected these problems. From 2003 to 2006, the bill never made it out of the Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration, even though by 2006 a majority of House members had signed on, including scores of Republicans.

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:

There have been some recent good pieces on the connection between the U.S. Attorney firings and the manufactured fear of voter fraud at the polls.

In yesterday's Washington Post, Michael Waldman and Justin Levitt of the Brennan Center for Justice wrote:

See also the Brennan Center's new Web site, truthaboutfraud.org, debunking the myth of rampant voter fraud.

Yesterday's LA Times had an OpEd, "Bush's long history of tilting Justice" by Joe Rich, who I mentioned in my earlier post on this subject. Rich had this to say:

The Maryland Senate has effectively quashed a bill that would have required voting machines to produce a paper record. A similar bill passed the House but the Senate bill was voted back to committee.

House bill sponsor Sheila Hixson was very disappointed, as are the many advocates who've been working on this issue for years in Maryland. Here's an excerpt from the report in the Baltimore Sun:

The Senate bill had dropped the requirement for audits, a piece of the "paper trail" legislation that Common Cause and many other voting reform groups feel is essential.

If a companion bill to Hixson's isn't acted upon in the next two weeks, Maryland will face the 2008 elections with the same issues as previous elections. Last year a similar bill passed the House and had the support of then-Governor Ehrlich but died in the Senate. Election supervisor Linda Lamone, a long-time vocal opponent of paper records, must have some good friends in the Senate, along with her pals at Diebold.

It's not going away. Evidence of the link between attempts to weaken laws that protect voters, create new laws that make it harder for some groups to vote, or practice blatant voter suppression tactics and the Bush administration's judicial activities grows stronger every day.

In the New Yorker Magazine this week, Jane Mayer spotlights Tim Griffin, a Rove protege who was brought in to replace H.E. Higgins as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Mayer reports that

"Caging" refers to the practice of sending mail to a particular list of voters and then striking those from the list whose mail is returned with "addressee unknown." The problem is that many voter lists are not updated and include old addresses. The same thing would happen if you were to send the mailing to any group of voters. It is extremely distressing to think that someone who learned dirty tricks like caging under Rove's tutelage was appointed a U.S. Attorney.

The second document I'd like to draw attention to is the testimony of Joseph Rich at yesterday's hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Joe Rich now works for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, but prior to this he worked for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division for almost 37 years. From 1999 to 2005, he was Chief of the Division's Voting Section. Here is an excerpt from his riveting testimony:
This is not really news -- Congress has been aware of it for a number of years. But now that it's out in the open and the electorate is getting mad, let's hope something is done. This behavior undermines our entire system of government.