After several years of rigorous debate, dialog, dissent, and discussion, after years of this evolutionary thought by patriotic American citizens, we have arrived at the simple conclusion that democratic elections require citizen oversight of the entire voting process, and that this is impossible when computers – with their processes invisible to the human eye – are involved. In other words, we have come right back to what the founders of our nation and the framers of our early state constitutions understood full well, which is why both the Massachusetts and New Hampshire constitutions state that our votes must be "sorted and counted" in "open meeting".
This raises doubt as well on optical scanners, which, as Dr. Dill full well knows, have been the perpetrators of at least as much electoral crime, fraud, and failure as the touch screens he derides in his piece.
And while it is true that much of the country has forgotten the lost art of hand counting paper ballots, New Hampshire, with its complex ballots and large jurisdictions (still hand counting up to 3-4-5 times the national average of ballots processed in any given polling place) has proven that the transparent and democratic method of administering hand count paper ballot elections is not only do-able, but is recommended for those truly wishing to create and support community-based, representative democracy and democratic elections.
As opposed to the impossibly complex recommendations coming out of Holt’s office and supported by others – with their own private techno-election agendas – who are pushing for more investment into privatized, corporately owned, high tech voting systems, hand count proponents are supporting transparency and public ownership in the entire voting process, which any logical, thinking, patriotic American should agree is a prerequisite for sustaining our democracy.
Be this as it may, had Holt’s office put forward a simple bill to mandate paper trails and audits, and if he had kept the bill's language simple enough to identify these as the criteria but to honor state plan processes in enacting the mandates, this bill would likely have received wide scale support even from hand count proponents.
In fact, I will make a public proclamation right here and now, that should Congress amend the Holt Bill in this specific manner I will muster every resource I have at my personal disposal to ensure passage of the bill.
Instead, Holt’s office put before us a highly complex, 50+ page bill that contains many unacceptable items. I will focus only on two of the unacceptable items in HR 811:
1) huge unfunded mandates, and
2) making permanent the Election Assistance Commission, an executive commission of four White House appointees -- the Commissioners of the Count -- who have absolute power and de facto regulatory control over the entire voting technology industry.
Making permanent the EAC, as Holt proposes in his bill, is not, as Dill states, giving the EAC “minimal responsibilities”.
By making them permanent, HR 811 is cementing a complete restructuring of the balance of power in our system of government, shifting power over our national election systems from the states, and in times of distress, Congress (a representative body) to the Executive Branch.
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