[Jane of Arc]

Okay POL kiddies! Time to create democracy! :agree: Please send an email to patriotism@earthlink.net with your name and address and ask to be added to the letter going to Congress to amend the Holt Bill. Please do it ASAP ... your email needs to be there in a couple of days. You can read the letter at Black Box Voting or there's a PDF file below. Thank you Patriots!!! :salut:



Black Box Voting

You've been asking us for what you can DO to help fix our broken election system. Here's your chance:

Please read the letter below, concerning the urgent need to amend the Holt Bill. PLEASE SIGN ON by sending an e-mail to patriotism@earthlink.net so that your name can be added to this letter when sent to members of the U.S. Congress.

Agree to add your name to the letter here: patriotism@earthlink.net

Include your full name, if you represent an organization please include the name of it; and make sure to include your address, city, county, state.

WHAT IS THE LETTER ABOUT?

The letter is printed in full below. Here is a link to a pdf version of the letter which you can forward to your friends to urge them to sign on also:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/requestbyvoters.pdf

BACKGROUND

You have undoubtedly been solicited by several large organizations and others to sign petitions for election reform at the national level. There are many legislative proposals to amend the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

There are divergent opinions on how to make our way out. We are working with an affiliation of groups and citizen election reformers, focusing on a direction that we know can WORK and can restore democratic elections to our country.

We are asking for your support of our *Request by Voters*, and for permission to add your name to our letter to Congress. Please respond with your affirmation of support TODAY. Send your name, state, and organization (if applicable) in a reply to this e-mail or send your reply to
patriotism@earthlink.net.

Then, pass on this request to everyone you know. Contact YOUR Congressional representatives and ask them to help amend the Holt Bill to include the remedies and recommendations found in the *Request by Voters*. Contact Congressman Rush Holt, and tell him you support the *Request by Voters*.

Contact Congressman Holt here: http://holt.house.gov/contact.shtml

Early sponsors of our *Request by Voters *include the following organizations and individuals:

BlackBoxVoting.ORG
Democracy for New Hampshire
Democracy for New Hampshire Fair Elections Committee
Election Defense Alliance
Josh Mitteldorf
Latinos for America
Mark Crispin Miller
National Ballot Integrity Project
New Hampshire Ballot Integrity Task Force
New Hampshire Citizens Alliance
New Hampshire Women Making a Difference
OpEdNews.com
Paul Lehto
Protect California Ballots
Show Me The Vote - Missouri

HERE IS THE FULL TEXT OF THE LETTER WE ARE ASKING YOU TO ADD YOUR NAME TO:

(To view a prettier version, click here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/requestbyvoters.pdf )

H.R. 550 Request by Voters REQUEST BY VOTERS: To amend H.R. 550 (aka the "Holt bill") with remedies and recommendations for removing obstacles to democratic elections

[halg]

So what happened?

Sorry I missed this; I was in the middle of moving.

[Mr. Anderson]

The Holt Bill still calls for electronic voting. Ugh. What's happening is it still hasn't been reformed to my knowledge. We need paper ballots, not a paper trail.

[halg]

Mr. Anderson:

Aren't paper ballots an essential part of a paper trail? I think they are. I belong to an organization out here in Phoenix that is striving, amongst other issues, to get paper ballots. That, along with better auditing methods, will help make our voting system more secure.

-Hal

[Jane of Arc]

Florida to Shift Voting System With Paper Trail
New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/us/02voting.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1170392400&en=a76a36ca9b6f80b8&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

Good news, right? Everybody's all happy in Florida. They're throwing out recently purchased voting machine and replacing them with more reliable optical scan machines with a paper trail. Sounds good, right? They're spending a lot more money than if they just used paper ballots, but what the heck ... this is America, right?! So, this is good.

Hello no. It's not good.

These optical scan machines are still computers and reeeally easy to hack! And they're made by companies like Diebold.

For anybody that STILL doesn't understand the need for paper ballot voting (like the Canadian system) and the need for the Kucinich voting bill (http://kucinich.us/node/114) to pass PLEASE read this:

http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/060305BBV/060305bbv.html

[Jennifer_SFBA]

Hi, Jane of Arc. Will HR 6200 by Dennis Kucinich be brought back this year, 2007? What is the Democratic leadership's stance on doing that? Let's push for it!

[Jane of Arc]

There is a reason you are receiving e-mails to urge your congressperson to "hurry" and pass the Holt Bill. They hope it won't be read.

You should know this -- the following groups have come out against the new Holt Bill:

- Black Box Voting has publicly come out against the Bill
- Open Voting Consortium has publicly come out against the Bill
- Brad Friedman (BradBlog) has publicly come out against the Bill
- Jon Bonifaz (VoterAction.org / Demos) has publicly come out against the Bill
- Paul Lehto has publicly come out against the Bill
- Democracy for New Hampshire has publicly come out against the Bill

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

[Lionhearted]

Jane,
I found this bit of information a glimmer of hope and thought that you (and others) may find it that way as well.

Missouri Activists Say “Show Me The Vote” (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0702/S00271.htm)

Kansas City, MO. A diverse group of Missouri activists made history today when they announced a 2008 ballot initiative to return their state elections to paper ballots. The country has adopted electronic voting at a break neck pace since 2000 propelled by over $6 billion in subsidies by the White House and Congress.

This announcement marks the first major resistance to the e-voting trend. If the initiative gets on the ballot and passes, Missourians will be voting on and hand counting paper ballots. Canada, Ireland, Italy, and England all vote on hand count paper ballots. The United States did as well until the rush to electronic voting rendered the traditional paper ballot all but extinct.

[Jane of Arc]

Thanks Lion!

Ya' gotta love the people of Missouri ... The "Show Me" State.

The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared,

"I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."

Regardless of whether Vandiver coined the phrase, it is certain that his speech helped to popularize the saying.

[haus]

this is worth a gander:

Diebold weighs strategy for voting unit
By M.R. KROPKO, AP Business Writer Sun Mar 4, 3:29 PM ET

CLEVELAND - Diebold Inc. saw great potential in the modernization of elections equipment. Now, analysts say, executives may be angling for ways to dump its e-voting subsidiary that's widely seen as tarnishing the company's reputation. (more... (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070304/ap_on_hi_te/diebold_voting))