SOURCE: Black Box Voting Below are the editorials from Black Box Voting, Open Voting Consortium, VotersUnite.org, and Nancy Tobi of Election Defense Alliance and Democracy for New Hampshire opposing and rebutting the latest incarnation of Holt's perpetually flawed proposal for election reform, currently known as "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 2894)"

STATEMENT OF BLACK BOX VOTING AGAINST HOLT BILL

We are in agreement that DRE voting machines need to be eliminated, but not at the expense of human rights. We don't need a "Holt Bill." What we do need:

PROTECT AND DEFEND PUBLIC ELECTION PRINCIPLES

(1) Protect and enforce right to know for every essential component of our public elections -- eliminate practices which allow government insiders to conduct key parts of elections in secret;

(2) Protect and enforce required checks and balances -- strengthen compliance, remedies and enforcement.

(3) Restore necessary mechanics for public elections: Require voter-marked paper ballots unless assistive device is required.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE HOLT BILL

The Holt Bill loses ground, further violates human rights, and actually reduces right to know. What Holt's "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act" provides that we do NOT want:

1. Increased (and for the first time, federally legislated) obstruction for public right to know

2. Mislabeled so-called "audits," which in addition to being unwieldy and expensive, produce false confidence. As proposed in the Holt Bill, they will do more harm than good.

3. Increased federal intrusion on rights to local governance.

4. Unfunded mandates for new-age voting machines that walk, talk, and dance the Macarena. Or at least, that grow hands and walk your ballot over to the box so you can't touch it.

The problem with these persistent new incarnations of the Holt Bill is that they jump to solutions without correctly identifying the core problem. The core problem is not voting machine "security", and it's not outside "hackers", and objections to the Holt Bill are not about trying to get "hand counted paper ballots." It's not about whether to have voting machines or not have voting machines. The real issue is protecting human rights.

Very simply, you cannot have liberty -- an inalienable right -- without self-government, and you cannot have self-government if essential components of the election are performed in secrecy by government insiders.

Each essential component in a public election must be publicly observable and understandable, without specialized knowledge, and the public must have access to remedies when witnessing violations of the law.

The principles I reference derive from the Declaration of Independence, the Seneca Falls Declaration (which formed the foundation for the women's suffrage fight), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, signed off by the United Nations), and the German high court's decision on e-voting, which does an excellent job of articulating the principle that all essential parts of the election must be subject to public oversight without requirement for special knowledge.

MECHANICS

There are principles, and there are mechanics which act to allow us to comply with principles of right to know and self-government. So let's move on to mechanics:

Regarding one of the essential elements of public elections, the vote-counting phase, the public needs something to look at that can be understood without specialized knowledge. We have such a thing in most places: Paper ballots. We need a one-trick pony piece of legislation to require voter-marked paper ballots.*

* With the possible exception of New York, where the lever machines actually are understandable by the public without specialized knowledge, and the New York procedures (if enforced and made public rather than party-centric) do allow the public to look and verify.

WHY VOTER-MARKED BALLOTS?

"Ballot marking devices", which print your ballot and spit it out for you, provide an inferior method of voting because they force you to become a proofreader. There is a 50-year body of research in cognitive studies showing that, as a rule, we are awful proofreaders. Our brains are wired to connect the dots rather than examine all the pixels in the dots. Try as we might, we skip over and let our brain complete the picture automatically.

In fact -- as any publisher will attest -- proofreading is a specialized skill that requires training, plenty of time, and a high level of discipline. It's definitely not something to require the public to do at a voting booth with a 2-year-old tugging at you and with a line of antsy voters behind you. Thus the need for not just ballots, but voter-marked ballots, with the exception of those requiring assistive devices.

WHY AREN'T THE SO-CALLED "AUDITS" ACTUALLY AUDITS?

A real audit leads with a management report. The management report identifies the checks and balances (like chain of custody) and evaluates whether procedures were sufficient to protect the spot-check portion of the audit. If the checks and balances were not followed, or were not in place, the audit disclaims any opinion on the numbers, regardless of whether they match. If people were allowed to call numbers-matching an "audit" in the world of financial investments, while skipping the accompanying management report, we'd have a whole lot of Americans losing their life savings when they invest.

The danger of mislabeling these vote spot-checks as "audits" is that for unsophisticated audiences, like reporters and citizen activists, it gives the impression that there was an audit, when actually there was only a spot check
sans checks and balance evaluation. You won't know whether you are spot-checking real or counterfeit ballots.

There is not a single election, or proposed procedure or bill, that offers a real audit and the Holt Bill certainly does not. It may not be possible to do a real audit within the time constraints involved in elections.

What's in the Holt Bill are not audits. The distinction is not trivial. And no, these spot-checks mislabeled as audits are not "better than nothing" unless you happen to be spot-checking an honest election. In a dishonest location, you won't find a dang thing and you'll end up with matching numbers and false confidence.

If people invested in the stock market based on mislabeled audits like this, we'd have millions of people holding stock that turns into hot air.

THE NEXT DANGER TO DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS: HOLT BILL WILL CREATE FORCED MAIL-IN VOTING

By making polling place voting too expensive and complicated to administer, the kinds of taxpayer-funded extravaganzas in the Holt Bill will force communities to close polling places. Black Box Voting is involved right now in a detailed analysis of the real risks with mass absentee voting. The more we learn, the more concerned we have become.

It is not too strong a statement, based on what we have now learned, to characterize mass mail-in voting systems as the ultimate step* towards elimination of public elections. These systems turn the whole kit and caboodle over to a small handful of insiders, who can execute any number of essential election functions in secrecy.

*The same can be said for Internet voting schemes.

Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

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Government is the servant of the people, and not the master of them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to
know. We insist on remaining informed so that we may retain control over the instruments of government we have created.

CHERRY-PICKING ELECTION REFORM ADVOCATES, STACKING THE EXPERTS DECK

As far as I can tell, the New York Times in its recent editorial (which did not even provide the correct name for the bill) did not contact or interview the many voting rights and election reform groups that oppose this bill; among those omitted, Black Box Voting, VotersUnite.org, Open Voting Consortium, or Democracy for New Hampshire's voting rights writer Nancy Tobi, who has been examining Holt's various renditions of his bill for years; nor did they mention the opposition of Brad Friedman of Bradblog, interview voting rights scholar and attorney Paul Lehto, or confer with the Election Defense Alliance.

So here are the statements by some of the election reform leaders whose input was omitted by the New York Times:

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STATEMENT AGAINST HOLT BILL BY OPEN VOTING CONSORTIUM

Dear Friends of Open Voting:

I need your help today. As you may recall, US Representative Rush Holt has introduced several badly flawed voting reform bills in the past few years. We have opposed them for a variety of reasons.

Last week, Holt introduced his new one: The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009 (HR 2894)
http://holt.house.gov/voting.shtml

In general, the bill is not as bad as the previous. Some provisions are good. Ban DREs, ban wireless, provide some funding for voting software that would be publicly available. However, overall, the bill is still bad. The deep flaw with this bill, generally speaking, remains the same: it would put the federal goverment too much into running the voting system. Holt is trying to do too much and making a mess of it.

Parts of it are outrageously bad. The main offending part for me is where they say the machine for individuals with disabilities must allow the voter to "independently verify and cast the permanent paper ballot without requiring the voter to manually handle the paper ballot;" This is ridiculous. This the proverbial $900 hammer approach. No machine has this capability currently, and such a machine would be many times more expensive than necessary. Potential solutions would solve one almost non-existent problem and create several others -- besides the expense.

It's the same mentality that led to adding the expensive printing mechanism to the DRE voting machines. Vendors didn't mind doing it as long as the government was paying for it. Guess what? Government paid for it. No wait, YOU paid for it. Now those machines are getting junked. So, tax-payers underwrote stupid voting architecture. Diebold et al got paid to develop it and sell it. Now the stupid machines go in the trash and Diebold keeps the money. It's another example of a very few outspoken "disabled rights activists" -- people in bed with industry -- creating a very expensive mandate.

If we can't get this changed, the bill must be killed. Other parts of the bill should just be removed rather than fixed. We might support it if chunks of it were simply removed.

A here is a link directly to the bill language.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c111:1:./temp/~c111Uxz8FM:e0:

SEC. 102. ACCESSIBILITY AND BALLOT VERIFICATION FOR
INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES.
...

(II) allows the voter to privately and
independently verify and cast the permanent
paper ballot without requiring the
voter to manually handle the paper ballot;

I need your help contacting Congress in opposition to this bill.

I also need your financial support so OVC can continue to develop and demonstrate sensible open source voting technology, and defeat crappy legislation like this.

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STATEMENT AGAINST HOLT BILL BY BY VOTERS UNITE:

http://www.votersunite.org/info/2009HoltBillTimeline.pdf
Updated: June 23, 2009

Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a new version of the ?Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act? ? H.R. 2894.

VotersUnite! commends the Congressman for the many improvements included in this year?s version, and we supported it in its initial form. However, during the finalization process, a provision was added that has caused us to withdraw our support.

The bill would require a non-tabulating ballot-marking device (BMD) in each polling place that ?allows the voter to privately and independently verify and cast the permanent paper ballot without requiring the voter to manually handle the paper ballot.? (Section 102.)

According to Noel Runyan, accessibility expert and advocate for accessible voting, independence in casting (depositing) the ballot is unnecessary for the privacy of the vote. In his report on ?Improving Access to Voting? he writes:

?Independence is not essential to guaranteeing privacy before a voter starts marking their ballot. Independence is required to assure privacy during the process of marking the ballot but is not essential for guaranteeing privacy after the ballot has been deposited into, and protected by, a privacy sleeve.?

http://voteraction.org/files/Improving_Access_to_Voting.pdf

The ramifications of this added accessibility requirement are significant for every jurisdiction in the country. Every jurisdiction would have to replace its accessible equipment by 2014.

The only vendor that advertises a system with the ?autocast? feature is ES&S, though the machine is not yet in use and has not yet been submitted to the EAC for certification. With a federal mandate for equipment currently developed by only one vendor, it is hard to predict how much the vendor will charge for the machine, the software, the support, and the licensing. The bill simply allocates ?such sums as may be necessary.?

On the following two pages is 1) a summary of the timeline of equipment replacement and the funding provided for each phase, developed through conversations with Congressman Holt?s office, and 2) a diagram showing the same information in abbreviated form.

Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009 TIMELINE 2010. Paperless DREs must be replaced by paper ballots and BMDs with accessible verifiability AND either of the following features:

1) ?autosleeve.? The machine automatically deposits the marked and verified ballot into a privacy sleeve. This feature does not fulfill the bill?s mandate since it still requires manual handling to deposit the ballot, but it is allowed for new purchases until 2014.

2) ?autocast.? The machine automatically deposits the marked and verified ballot into a ballot box or optical-scan machine for tallying.
BMDs already in use as of the national election in 2008 may continue to be used until 2014. $1,000,000,000 (Billion) is allocated.

2010 to 2014. Jurisdictions needing to replace existing DREs or BMDs or add accessible equipment for any reason may only purchase BMDs with accessible verifiability and either autosleeve or autocast. No funds have been allocated to support these purchases.

2014. DREs with VVPAT must be replaced by paper ballots and BMDs with accessible verifiability and the autocast feature, and all non-autocast BMDs must be replaced by BMDs (or retrofitted) with accessible verifiability and autocast. Such funds as are needed are allocated.

Potential ramifications:

The AutoMark is presently the only device with the autosleeve feature. If no other device with autosleeve or autocast is available before 2010, all jurisdictions currently using paperless DREs will have to purchase autosleeve BMDs from ES&S. This includes six entire states and jurisdictions in nine other states.

ES&S advertises an AutoMark AutoCast device that would meet the new federal accessibility requirement and claims that no other vendor has such a device. No system using the ES&S AutoCast has yet been submitted to the EAC for certification.

If no other autocast BMD is available by 2014, all jurisdictions in the country will have to purchase the ES&S device. Further, if the ES&S AutoCast is not compatible with a jurisdiction?s ballot scanner, the jurisdiction will have to purchase new scanners as well.

If no system with an autocast BMD is EAC-certified before 2014, states requiring EAC certification will have to break their own laws in order to purchase the BMDs necessary to fulfill the federal mandate.

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STATEMENT AGAINST HOLT BILL BY NANCY TOBI, DEMOCRACY FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE / ELECTION DEFENSE ALLIANCE

http://www.opednews.com/articles/2009-Holt-Bill-E-Voting--by-Nancy-Tobi-090329-8 32.html
2009 Holt Bill.

E-Voting: Making a bad system worse

We oppose this year's version of the legislation as well because it repeats all of the errors of past versions.

Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) is getting ready to introduce his 2009 electronic voting bill. Interested readers can review the 65-page proposal here. Holt has been trying for several years to pass one version or another of this bill.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires observable vote counting. Many state constitutions demand a public voting system with public vote counts. The Holt Bill mandates computerized voting systems, and enforces concealed vote counting.

Concealed vote counting violates our voting rights.

The Holt Bill extends the federally sponsored 2002 e-voting Ponzi scheme, when Congress, through the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), invested $4 billion taxpayer dollars into a fraudulent e-voting promise, causing the states to scoop up computerized voting machines and voting registration systems that turned out to be as fraud-friendly as the firm of Madoff Investment Securities.

If you think the Madoff Ponzi scheme was extensive, consider this e-voting rip-off.
The e-voting scheme promised huge returns: High tech, efficient elections. Voting systems that can meet the needs of every voter with a disability, every voter speaking a language other than English, you name it, e-voting will do it. But there was nothing behind this promise.
The e-voting legislation invested taxpayer dollars into an industry producing fraud-friendly voting systems, with built-in double and triple sets of accounting books, audit reports and logs that drop data tracking of programmatic events like changed vote counts and the like.

This is the industry whose product gave a negative count of 16,022 votes for candidate Al Gore in the Florida 2000 election, delivering the wrong President to America.

The 2002 Congressional e-voting bill also established a White House agency (the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC), which perpetuates e-voting failures by drafting new e-voting standards and schedules for the states, which can never - in reality - be met. The EAC drafts standards for e-voting equipment that hasn?t been built, hasn?t been tested, and, which is so complex that no ordinary election official could possibly operate independently of private industry control.

The EAC e-voting scheme has the states investing in equipment that will require upgrades or replacements in each succeeding election. In this scenario, the e-voting industry gets richer while America's elections become pilot runs to test new technologies!

The $4 billion e-voting systems - and the multi-millions of continuing taxpayer e-voting "investments" since 2002 - have delivered truly catastrophic elections.

Machine breakdowns. Unprovable election results. Unlimited avenues for manipulation.

Once the states used up the first $4 billion federal dollars, they were left to their own devices to come up with the continuous cash flow required to service, repair, and replace the error-prone e-voting systems. Not to mention costs for storage, transportation, certification and recertification.

Now comes the Holt Bill with a new provision that will up the e-voting ante by requiring states to purchase entirely new technologies: high tech, high cost, highly complex, computerized assistive voting technologies that do not even exist yet.

Many citizen activists, myself included, have opposed previous versions of the Holt Bill.

1. It contains a concealed vote counting provision that allows access to voting machine software only to "qualified" experts and only if they sign a nondisclosure agreement. The Holt Bill will make concealed vote counting federal law. If Holt's bill passes, it would be a federal crime to let the public know whether or not voting machines work as promised!

2. The bill includes a provision for high cost, high tech, as yet non-existent technologies that are allegedly designed to enable "accessibility" to disabled voters. This is another multi-billion dollar boondoggle that enriches the e-voting industry and bankrupts the democratic process by rendering our elections completely opaque and under the control of corporate high tech industries. It is already possible to achieve accessible voting without the use of complex, high cost, opaque, technologies.

3. The bill places a White House agency between the states and their certification of election results. It requires states to provide all kinds of data to the EAC in order to certify election results. The obvious conflict of interest in having the White House involved in election certifications opens the door to dangerous litigation should the EAC agency take issue with the data or the election results. This places election results in the hands of the Executive branch and possibly even the Judiciary, which may once again be called upon to decide election outcomes.

4. The bill subverts the election night first count as the vote of record and replaces it with the results from post-election sampling. Post-election sampling is highly vulnerable to chain of custody risk vectors of all kinds. Furthermore, the sampling (or ?audits?) so far proposed by Holt, are not statistically adequate to ensure any reliable verification of election night results.

Holt supporters advocate for the bill because it provides incremental progress, in that it requires durable paper ballots in every election system.

But the negative Gore vote count in Florida happened in a system using durable paper ballots.

The problem was they were counted in a concealed electronic count with no public oversight.
The incremental step of getting paper ballots into every voting system offers a placebo effect to make people feel good without improving the democratic process.

Holt's bill expands corporate control over our elections, usurps public authority and oversight, subverts election night vote counts, and allows for White House intervention in election results.

We have no excuse to compromise on democracy. We now know too much about e-voting and its risks. We understand the perils of concealed electronic vote counting and corporate control over our elections. We know, too, that post-election samples of possibly compromised ballots do not legitimately replace election night public vote counts.

Today, Americans are demanding change in broad strokes: for our health care, our economy, our environment, our education? and, yes, our elections.

We cannot allow the Holt Bill to pass.
Election reform efforts must focus on restoring voting rights: repeal HAVA, eliminate the EAC , and honor our tradition of representational democracy, self-governance, and public oversight of our elections.