ACTION ONE: Please call, email, fax Your STRONG PROTEST of Holt's H.R. 811, As Soon As Possible as the U.S. House returns this Monday, April 16th, and may try to fast track Holt's H.R. 811 again.
Go To Election Defense Alliance's Action Page: http://electiondefen...
Call: Rep. Charles A. Gonzales (D-TX 20th)
Phone: (202) 225-3236
Fax: (202) 225-1915
E-mail Webform: http://gonzalez.hous...
Other members of the committee: http://www.electiond...
The House Reconvenes Monday, April 16.
Let's greet them with whirring FAX machines pouring out citizen opposition to H.R. 811.
Prior to Spring recess, the HCA was trying to "fast track" H.R. 811.
An unprecedented outpouring of citizen protest stopped them in their tracks. Keep FAXING and pouring it on until Congress gets the message:
END the EAC
(Keep the unitary executive OUT of elections) BAN DREs
(The Holt bill supports them) END SECRET COUNTS
(Currently 85+% of our votes are counted in secret, with no citizen oversight)
Copy and Forward this Page Widely with this Link: http://www.ElectionD...
ACTION TWO: Please call, email, fax Your STRONG SUPPORT of Burnam's HB 3894. In Texas, it is extremely important we pass this bill, Rep. Burnam's 3894 Hand Counted Papers 2007 in THIS session (which ends at the end of May 2007) because the next session of the Texas Legislature isn't until January 2009-which is AFTER the 2008 Presidential Election.
Go To: http://voterescue.or...
Find Contact Information for your Texas Representatives at:http://www.fyi.legis...
from: http://voterescue.or...
THE most important action to take right now, is to contact your House Representative by visiting their Capitol office and/or mailing or faxing a personal letter urging him/her to sponsor HB 3894 (the bill for Hand Counted Paper Ballots 2007) NOW! Please go to our newly overhauled website at www.voterescue.org for contact information and an overview of the bill. When you receive a favorable reply, please let Karen Renick, Director, know at 496-7408 as soon as possible.
...HR 811 has now passed out of that committee and is headed to the floor for consideration by the House. Although some changes have been scribbled into it, the bill still permits the use of DRE machines. So HR 811 is, at best, as good as useless.
Thus the Dems have tucked themselves into their deathbeds, and will disappear into the Great Beyond as sure as shootin', with the Bush Republicans in the role of Jack Kevorkian (but without the solemn face).
Why are the Dems doing it? Basically, because they cannot, will not, recognize that it is happening. It's too big, too scary, and they don't want to go there--even though the unraveling US Attorney scandal makes it ever clearer that election fraud is at the heart, and is there very basis of, this whole regime.
Texas is one of several states subject to the Voter Rights Act Section 5 pre-clearance whereby election practices or procedures are frozen until the new proposed procedures have been subjected to review by the US Department of Justice. You wouldn't be too surprised by our state neighbors in the VRA Section 5 pool. You also wouldn't be too surprised that under the Bush administration DOJ pre-clearance has been relatively easy.
LA Times 3/25/2007 Justice Department tugged to the right
Under Bush, the department has been tainted by politics, many say.
(snip)
The Civil Rights Division veterans focused their criticism on major voting case decisions over the last six years that they say have generally benefited the GOP.
The most recent case concerned a 2005 Georgia law that required voters to provide photo identification. Staff attorneys raised concerns about the law after the Georgia secretary of state supplied data showing that tens of thousands of voters might not have driver's licenses or other prescribed forms of identification. They said the plan could effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters.
Monday the state Senate will hold public hearings on SB 836 (Duncan-R). This bill would allow the expansion of countywide polling locations, sometimes called Super Precincts.
Lubbock County was the only county to conduct the pilot program in November 2006.
The results of the pilot were crystal clear, but totally excluded from the Secretary of State's report to the legislature. The results?
Overall voting declined by 3.6%
Voting in the top 10 minority precincts declined 25.7%
There was no cost savings.
There was no influx of first-time voters.
I was part of the group that implemented this pilot. It failed miserably, but the Lubbock County Elections office and Secretary of State's office have continued to be cheerleaders for this bad policy. They have both submitted reports that are absent of any negative results.
I'll be at the hearing and hope that the Senators will listen.
Hope that some of you who care about voting for all Texans can join me.
Texas Rep. Lon Burnam Submits Bill for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots in Texas
By Vickie Karp and Karen Renick
Rep. Lon Burnam, District 90, Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas Submitted HB 3894, The Texas Hand Counted Paper Ballot Bill of 2007
With the acknowledgment and validation from computer experts, government reports and university studies nationwide that electronic voting systems, including optical scan counters, are vulnerable to easy hacking and manipulation without detection, the need for drastic change in our voting systems has become evident. Well-intentioned legislators at both the federal and state levels have presented the costly "solution" of adding printers to electronic voting machines for a "voter verifiable paper audit trail."
What Does H.B. 3894, the Texas Hand-Counted Paper Ballot Bill of 2007, Do?
1. Repeals the use of any electronic "voting system" from the Texas State Election Code and leaves hand-counted paper ballots as the only voting method allowed by code in Texas.
Thank you so much, Texas Rep. Lon Burnam and Vickie Karp and Karen Renick of VoteRescue, http://voterescue.or... and Bruce O'Dell of Election Defense Alliance, http://electiondefen....
MoveOn strikes a devastating blow against its own credibility as an activist organization with this strong support for Holt's HR 811 "paper trail and audit" "solution". They specifically reference the last minute strong opposition which was activists burning up the fax lines of Congress, with a little help from some elected officials opposing unfunded mandates. Word on the street was that this committee of Congress had never seen such a response to oppose legislation, yet here MoveOn attempts to commit the activists who aren't keeping close tabs on this into fighting with the other activists! We can have legitimate disagreements and oppose each other, but for MoveOn not to even identify the issues correctly is truly abysmal.
Hillary Clinton answered part of the question in her wonderful speech this weekend on Civil Rights and Voting Rights (and more). John Edwards was asked part of the question and answered part of the question this weekend. Last year Dennis Kucinich answered the question with a bill for Hand Counted Paper Ballots.
Ask all our Candidates:
Count the Votes in THEIR OWN RE-ELECTION in Secrecy or...
since they are voting on their own re-election, they should be jumping to support the most transparent, accountable, public-friendly and publicly-overseeable method possible: hand counted paper ballots..
The AJ is drooling all over itself about the possibility of Lubbock County being awarded "super precinct" status. The idea is simple: Do away with the old "vote in the precinct where you live" idea and allow people to vote at any polling station in the county.
Vote close to work during your lunch hour, vote at the grocery store. Work in one of our neighboring communities? Vote there. Recently moved and don't know what your new precinct is? No problem - just vote anywhere.
Here's a list of media stories reporting problems with electronic voting systems. The biggest story was the 100,000 over vote count in Tarrant county using Hart Intercivic's eSlate system. Yesterday however, the SOS actually stopped a recount in Tom Green County due to vote tally discrepancies. They use Hart Intercivic's eSlate system as well.
(I continue to be impressed with some of the quality writing that shows up in the Journals. - promoted by Karl-Thomas Musselman)
And more reasons why the party of gloom and doom continues to lose.
The recent publicity surrounding V.P. Cheney’s hunting accident, and Democratic Party members’ insistence on making this an issue has made me wonder. Why do we as Democrats insist on being the heavy, why in this case do we have to make an issue of what amounts to an old man having a terrible accident and nearly killing his friend? This was not a policy activity, and should not be an issue for us as Dems. If the citizenry and the press have a problem with the timeliness of his release of information, let them carry the banner of that disappointment. In this case, it was obvious they were more than willing to do so; the press corps has had a long standing problem with the tight lipped attitude of the Bush White House. This was not our battle to fight, and yet we seem unable to resist picking up every available stone and giving it a toss.
I wanted to point everyone to an ongoing debate about the rights and abilities of Texans to be able to vote.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott recently wrote an opinion piece for the Fort Worth Star Telegram titled, “Voter Fraud Must Stop.” Abbott discussed his commitment to use a newly created office – the Special Investigations Unit - and a $1.5 million grant from the Governor's office to train local officials so they can stop what Abbott describes as “an epidemic of voter fraud [that] is infesting the electoral process.”
Ed Ishmael, a Dallas lawyer and President and Cofounder of the Texas Values in Action Coalition, disagrees with Abbott’s assertion that voter fraud is an “epidemic” in Texas. In a viewpoint posted on Dallas Blog, Ishmael points out that:
If you add up all of the suspects Abbott references in his article as being somehow involved in election fraud in Texas, it comes to 16…If you wade through Abbott’s carefully parsed words, you see that only three of these suspects have actually been found guilty (all three of them pleaded guilty) and the rest have either been merely accused or only recently indicted so they haven’t even yet gone to trial...Three! How is that an epidemic?
Abbott also counts election code violations as voter fraud. As Mr. Ishmael points out, violations cover everything from “wearing the wrong T-shirt at the polling place to Tom DeLay’s alleged money laundering schemes” – a broad definition, to be sure.
What, then, is the purpose of claiming that these few instances of voter fraud constitute an epidemic? Why the exaggeration? In Ishmael’s opinion, Abbott is attempting to suppress voter turnout by exaggerating the realities of voter fraud. If you look at the track record of Abbott’s fellow Republicans, you may find some truth to that.
During the 79th Regular Session, Republican House Member Mary Denny proposed legislation that would have required Texas voters to present both their voter registration card and a photo ID or at least two other forms of identification in order to vote. The crux of Rep. Denny’s argument was that Texas suffered from a tremendous amount of voter fraud – yet, Rep. Denny could never provide sufficient evidence to support her claim. If Abbott is successful in getting Texans to believe that there is an ever-spreading “epidemic” of voter fraud, then Republicans could gain greater popular support for their photo-ID legislation which, in turn, could ultimately disenfranchise thousands of Texas voters.
In the end, Rep. Denny’s “photo ID bill” (HB 1706) passed the House but failed in the Senate. It was born again as an amendment to Senate Bill 89, but eleven Democratic Senators killed the bill by signing a pledge that threatened to filibuster and forcing the Senate to reject the legislation. However, if we allow people to believe that only three proven instances of voter fraud in ten months constitutes an “epidemic,” then Democrats may not be so successful next time around.
