Blogged by Brad Friedman from the road in Oklahoma…
“By November 2008, every voter would be given a verifiable paper ballot,” Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) lies to Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet today concerning his flawed Election Reform Bill (HR811) which is still pending in Congress.
Despite the comments to Rosenfeld, Holt’s legislation does not require a “paper ballot” — no matter how many times he tries to put lipstick on that pig.
The state of California recently found the very voting systems Holt is pushing to see used across the entire nation to be easily hackable and not in compliance with federal requirements for disabilities voters. The state also found the “paper trail” that Holt’s bill is to require for such systems, and which California already uses, cannot stop the tampering with votes found to be so easy on such systems.
Despite CA SoS Debra Bowen having decertified and severely restricted the use of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting machines with so-called “Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails” (VVPATs) last Friday — as the Holt bill would allow for use — and despite her having found that such paper trails do not protect voters and do not even meet minimal disabled accessibility standards, Holt continues apace to push his paper trail bill.
California’s unprecedented independent study and actions “just adds more weight, more urgency to the need to pass federal standards,” Holt told Rosenfeld concerning Bowen’s appropriate decision to restrict the use of the systems. “We can’t go into another federal election with machines that do no allow voters to verify their votes,” he said — despite the fact that his legislation does exactly that.
While Holt continues his disappointing campaign to deceive voters, media, and Congress Members into believing that “paper trails” are actually paper ballots, America seems to be moving on without him for the time being. In addition to the new restrictions in California, the use of DREs was recently banned entirely in Florida and New Mexico, and other states are re-evaluating their use of such systems.
HR 811’s most powerful proponent/advocacy-group inside the beltway, People for the American Way (PFAW), is on record as preferring non-verifiable DRE voting systems over real paper ballots. They’d both do well to reconsider their positions, and adopt the voters’ desire for paper ballots — ones which are actually counted — and a full ban on DREs.
Mr. Holt: Your deceptive misuse of the words “paper ballots” is a dog which no longer hunts. Please stop it.
[DISCLOSURE: I was asked to work with Holt’s office on the language in HR 811 prior to its introduction in the U.S. House. Though I strongly urged they ban the use of DRE systems, that particular recommendation was not taken. I was, however, told that if I could convince PFAW to accept such a ban, they’d adjust their legislation immediately. So far, that has yet to happen. PFAW can be reached at PFAW@PFAW.org.]DEMAND A BAN ON DRE/TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING!
– Email Congress!
– Call your members!
See www.BradBlog.com/Holt for more details, coverage, talking points & information on all of the above!
🙂 Me thinks thou protest too loudly 😉
Brad, why didn’t you just get them to have DRE machines used like Debra did? She did not ban them to Pluto, the non-planet, she limited their use so as to limit their damage …
Think about it, that would have been the most simple of amendments. Limit DRE and/or touchscreen, and that ilk, to the disabled it was said to be designed for.
What kinda personality conflict do you have with these people at Holt and why? And do you feel the same about Nelson and his S. 559?
Not to worry Brad, the fushion, fission, or other forms of forced morph will not pass until all source code review by the public is removed and Stalinism (save Ken and Kathy) is also protected. In other words HR 811 and its Senate compliment S. 559 will not pass and there will be no mandated paper ballots.
Rest, for the ’08 election will be done in the same environment as the ’06 election was.
You know, mysteriously and inexplicably the bushies lost seats in both houses.
Holt voted against giving preznit blush warrantless wiretap powers in the FISA law.
Even Ron Paul didn’t go that far. Go figure.
It must be the ACVR territory your itinerary is transiting, BF, looking at the early threads at the website, yet, consider this by Hil-C, a marvelously simple $300. laptop vote machine rolled out in India where 600 M people voted on the devices recently, restoring the formerly 60-year dominant party to office in one state. Registrars of voters would like the bargain pricetag, and it is paperless; I wonder if its voter PIN is a biometric.
Dredd sedd:
While I might have been willing to discuss such a temporary compromise (even if I wouldn’t have liked it, as I don’t in CA, since Bowen found the DREs to not even meet the accessibility standards), they refused this route, claiming it would somehow “ghettoize” disabled voters.
Never mind that disabled voters needn’t use the DREs if they don’t wish and that we don’t do away with all staircases when we add ramps to buildings to meet ADA requirements.
I’ll leave my opinions about their personalities out of it, as this is anything but personal.
As to Nelson and S 559, it’s essentially a clone of the original HR 811 (before it was amended to be even worse than it started at introduction) along with a few good measures tacked on. But it has the same probs the original Holt bill had, and thus, it fails America and democracy.
Unfortunately, even if HR 811 and S 559 did pass, there would still be no paper ballots. That’s the problem, since both of those bills require only uncounted paper trails.
But I wouldn’t give up the ’08 ghost just yet. As you know, I don’t easily give up any fight when it’s worth having. 🙂
Brad #4
But you accused Holt of “Lying to Voters” which is a radical departure from the norms of debate.
You are not on solid ground at all, and appear totally shrill, even tho you are not. And appearances are important in this realm.
First of all, a statute cannot lie, and neither HR 811 or its Senate twin S. 559 “lie”.
I have urged you and other stars in the EI movement to study up on statutory construction, which is what you are doing when you declare what a statute says. And they same canons apply to any bill before the bill becomes law.
You stars of the movement are doing statutory construction assbackwards. I will debate any competent lawyer you provide here on this blog as to the meaning the courts will give to the words “paper ballot” mentions scores of times in the twin bills.
It most certainly will not be interpreted to mean “paper trail”, because those words are not even in the text.
Notice carefully the first canon of statutory construction, because you would not get past it:
(Connecticut Nat’l Bank v. Germain, 503 US 249 (1992)). I am not shitting you Brad, the judges would laugh at you if you were before a judicial tribunal making the argument that “paper ballots” used in the text of the bill does not mean “paper ballots”.
And if you throw in the text’s own definition and description of a “paper ballot”, you would be in deeper doo doo indeed:
(ibid, emphasis mine). How are you going to convince a reasonable person or judge that “a paper ballot prepared by the voter to be mailed to an election official” is just some electrons inside a DRE that no one will ever see?
And to convince them that Holt is lying by using this text? As a friend I must urge you to slow down.
Brad #4 (continued from post #5)
Another canon of statutory interpretation is:
It would be an absurdity for a lawmaker to use “paper ballots” to not mean paper ballots. And no reasonable judge is going to interpret the plain words “paper ballot” to mean anything other than that.
If these arguments do not persuade you then I suspect that nothing will, and so I will not waste our time further on it.
All of Dredd’s previously discredited pro-e-voting bullshit dragged out again… apparently for the CA decerts audience we’ve presumably acquired… in hopes of… what?
Nothing has changed. The arguments Dredd fields are as invalid now as they were before the decerts. And when the gaping holes in Dredd’s logic are inevitably pointed out then Dredd will once again try to evade the actual, factual arguments marshalled against him by diving into ever-widening gyrations of sophistry in a vain attempt to baffle the readers with even-more BS piled on top of the original BS.
And for those playing the home version of the game: no, we don’t know how much of this kaka Dredd actually believes either… 🙂
Dredd sedd:
You are correct in that this is the first time I’ve accused Holt of “lying”. Shrill? Perhaps. Correct? Yes.
Why have “norms of debate” been dropped here? Because Holt is attempting to use the findings in CA — which run counter to his assertions about his bill and about voting machines in general (DREs, specifically) — to serve as evidence for why his bill should be passed immediately.
Never mind that the findings in CA actually serve as reasons to not pass his bill as currently written, since his bill will allow for paper trail DREs which CA has found do not protect against tampering.
Enough deception is enough. Holt should have/could have taken the findings in CA as reason to go back to PFAW and Hoyer and say “That’s it! We can no longer go on with this charade concerning DREs with VVPATs (paper trails). CA gives us the cover, finally, to ban DREs once and for all”.
Instead he went out to the media and lied — yes, lied — when he said about his bill that “By November 2008, every voter would be given a verifiable paper ballot.”
Now clearly you wish to debate the legal, statutory meaning of “paper ballot”. And you’ll be surprised to hear, perhaps, that I don’t entirely disagree with you. A case could be made by some legal beagle somewhere, if they happen to get a federal judge with some modicum of courage, that because the word “paper ballot” is used in the statute, that it means the old time definition of “paper ballot” must apply. That being, an object which is actually counted to determine the results of an election.
But good luck finding such an attorney, such a receptive court, appellate court and Supreme Court which would uphold such a finding. Recent historical evidence shows us that courts want nothing to do with this stuff, and as in CA, they are happy to find that a “paper ballot” — when it comes to a paper trail record of a vote on a DRE — doesn’t actually have to be counted except in cases of audit or recount, and even then, not necessarily (see the recent Orange County decision, decided by just three votes, where the paper ballots were all recounted, but the paper trails didn’t need to be.)
So yes, there could be a legal foothold to be had in the unfortunate case that Holt is passed and signed as is. But it’s a long shot at best, and would be more likely to go the other way: Establishing uncounted “paper trails” to be ballots, even though they are never counted.
Thus, enough with deception from Holt at this point. WE have been proven right, HE has been proven wrong and there is no reason to pass federal legislation that runs the risk of redefining the word “ballot”, encodes secret software and non-disclosure agreements into federal law, and otherwise moves us in the wrong direction instead of the right direction (as Bowen has done).
The_zapkitty #7; Brad #8
Wow, puss and Brad tag team against Dredd 🙂 … we should sell tickets 😉
I feel sorry for you Brad. S/he is the puss that argued Stalin did the most purrfeckt of elections, and that your quote of Stalin on the boot up may be apocrapha.
S/he is far better than you are at proving my points, so your points are the only ones valid enough for me to address.
You say:
Well Brad, that is because debating “the legal, statutory meaning” according to legal statutory canon is where the rubber meets the road. Any other type of discussion of law is mouth diarrhea a la fundies debating it at a bingo tournament. Not for Dredd, that is a puss thingy.
You want to forum shop and find a judge who will hold:
Stalin’s old time ballots? If it is good enough for
JesusStalin it is good enough for me?Hey Brad, I notice that you don’t quote the text you are claiming to be interpreting! You should get religion because in fact the text does require far better paper than Stalin used (sorry puss).
As puss points out, Stalin was so good that he never had to count more than once, but we mere mortals may have to count several times. So the paper Holt mandates is:
(HR 811, emphais added).
You also say Holt should say:
Screw cover, lets just tell the truth out in the open. Brad, CA still uses DRE’s. Debra will still use them.
But she has limited their use, so it would not follow that Holt could honestly use that as “cover” for the purpose you mentioned he should.
If DRE should be banned and Debra did not do it, she is as guilty as Holt, and extolling her virtue while condemning his is contradictory.
Holt should be treated as fairly as Debra has been. At the worst both advocate some use of DRE and they both merely temporarily try to tame DRE in lieu of what we all are heading for, which is their ultimate demise.
This is too long for one post, so will continue in another one later bro.
Dredd sedd:
Yep, no one but the puss can mail electrons to an election official and call it paper.
Puss, you are so “isn’t that special” a la SNL.
Dredd re-sedd:
Of course it does. Her studies found (briefly summarized) that a) The DREs don’t meet the minimal disabled accessibility standards they were purportedly needed for in the first place and b) Paper trails on such machines do not keep a system from being gamed without detection.
In the meantime, unlike Holt, Bowen is responsible for assuring there will actually be elections come Feb ’08 and she must walk the line between outright banning for the moment, and meeting some sort of accessibility standards as required by federal law (even as she finds those machines don’t meet the standards that the feds have approved them for).
Her transitional use of the current DREs, one per polling place for disabilities access plus 100% manual hand count of the paper trails is a worthy step in the right direction.
Holt’s mandates to continue using the DREs in any way that anyone sees fit, forever, as long as they have the paper trails that California already has (and has found to be little deterrent against theft) and as long as 3% to 10% of those trails are counted after an election, would be disastrous to encode into federal law.
It would give a federal thumbs up for all states to use machines that we all now know to be incompatible with democracy.
Bowen is transition away from the machines, while hoping to continue some form of orderly process at elections. Holt is transition towards the very machines that don’t work and encoding both them and — for the first time — non-disclosure agreements and secrecy of corporate run elections into federal law.
If you see those two different approaches as the same, I’m not sure what kool aid you been drinking.
He has been. Moreso, in fact. He has received benefits of the doubts for months beyond what even I feel comfortable with. So if you compare what I’ve reported on him and his bill, with what I actually believe and know about him and it, you’d see that he has been treated *more* than fairly since I admire, at least, his original and early interest in trying to do something about this problem.
Brad #11
Your assertion that “Holt’s mandates to continue using the DREs” is inaccurate. There is no such mandate as I read the text.
Please provide a post of the text you say does that, in case I missed it.
A valid criticism one could level against Holt is that it does not prohibit or forbid DRE technology.
That would be a reasonable interpretation, and one I think the judges would agree with. The phrase “or a paper ballot produced by a touch screen or other electronic voting machine” in Holt would include DRE technology in my opinion.
However, it is unsupportable to day that Holt / Nelson mandates DRE technology. It does no such thing IMO.
As to being fair to him, you really miss the boat here and end up being your own apologist. You have not called Debra a liar but you call him a liar, and say you treat him even better? Who is drinking kool aid.
You say he had it right at first (“he has been treated *more* than fairly since I admire, at least, his original and early interest”). I don’t know what your admiration has to do with being fair.
Assuming arguendo that Holt was influenced by over two hundred congress members supporting his bill, why would you not call these people deceivers …
(HR 811 Co-Sponsors) instead of calling Holt a liar?.
Brad
You still say that “paper ballot” in the text of HR 811 and S. 559 does not mean what it says. Consider the definition of “paper” the bills require:
(See S. 559 / Holt orig). The term archival quality paper is a term of art generally used for special documents that must withstand handling over a long period of time.
It is beyond silly to think electrons in memory (DRE) can be called archival quality paper able to endure multiply hand counts!
What this requirement in the bills does is require DRE machines to record each ballot seperately so the ballots can be hand counted repeatedly as needed.
That would be during every audit and every recount by hand. DRE electrons cannot be counted by hand and are not paper. That much is clear and you are avoiding these facts for some reason.
No, they are not ballots, nor can they be considered ballots by any stretch of the imagination.
These fancy archival-quality printouts can sit in a bin uncounted while the machines instead count electronic figments of somebody’s imagjnation… maybe the voters’ intentions, maybe not.
There is nothing in Holt’s fiasco of a bill that requires that each DRE-produced printout be counted.
And even your eternally twisting logic must acknowledge that if it is not required to be counted… then it’s not a ballot.
(ps… and that still leaves all the other different ways that the current mutation of the bill screws with our democratic processes…)
Please quote the language in the text. I am not into imagined friends, imagined words, or imagined law.
That is a bushie thang.
Saying something is not what it is does not make it so.
Every paper ballot is printed by something. That is the only way to get the ink on the paper.
Your argument is pathetic and shameful.
Put up the text that supports what you say or shut up. Everyone can see there is something behind you besides honest argument.
Uh … the_zapkitty has declared itself to be the winner of this debate, so move on no story here …
No, Dredd. There is a) No mandate to count those “paper ballots” archival, durable or otherwise and b) No way that anybody can ever demonstrate they were actually created acurately to the voters intent and c) They do not allow the voter to check their ballot before it is cast and counted, as required by HAVA section 301.
You are just wrong here. And even Holt’s supporters (the honest ones) would admit that to ya. BUt they want “something”, under the false presence that “it’s better than nothing”, so they are supporting the bill. But the honest ones aren’t even making the case you are attempting to.