In an article by Ian Urbina, The New York Times’ now has their story up about the Senate’s Emergency Paper Ballot legislation as filed earlier today by Senators Boxer and Dodd.
UPDATE: An updated version of the NYTimes article, now linked above, has added Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) as a co-sponsor of the legislation as well!
The BRAD BLOG broke the story earlier today in a bit more detail, and along with the actual bill filed. We originally called on Congress in article published here a week ago today, to introduce and pass such a bill before their Election Recess coming up at the end of this week.
Urbina offers several additional points worth checking out in his Times coverage. Including this quote from Boxer concerning her reasons for not making the paper ballot initiative mandatory, but rather allowing it to remain optional to states and local jurisdictions [emphasis ours]:
…As well, “Brad Friedman, a liberal blogger” is mentioned in the Times article.
So as the good Senator B, doesn’t get the idea we were dissing her bill to the NY Times (We weren’t! Not by any means!) in the comments attributed to us in the piece, please us allow a clarification.
The statement they used from us, had originally preceded a full direct quote explaining that Election Directors from states like Florida had expressed concern that they might need a Federal mandate in order to take advantage of the this paper ballot legislation. State election code in Florida, we’re told, does not have provisions allowing such elections officials to make paper ballots available, even if they wanted to.
In Florida’s touch-screen-only counties, for example, which comprise some 50% of Sunshine State voters, even the Provisional Balloting is done electronically on touch-screen systems! Which means, as Leon County, FL Election Director Ion Sancho explained to us this morning, that without a Federal mandate, it’s likely that those officials would not be able to take advantage of this legislation…even if it manages to get through the full Congress in the few days left before Congress breaks for their Election Recess.
UPDATE: Ah, proof, I’m not crazy! In this version of the Times article (how many do they release?!) there is this additional quote from yours truly:
See? Phew…
Beyond that, given the short time left here, we’re delighted to see this legislation move forward! Delighted to see the Times’ coverage. And just delighted in general that someone in Washington D.C. is finally recognizing the dangers to democracy that we’re facing in the upcoming mid-term election!
I see we have Russ Feingold to thank as well, as a Senate co-sponsor. Splendid.
I trust Lou Dobbs can get behind this – I hope he will, and soon. Not to mention Keith Olbermann. When was the last time they could seriously help to make something seriously better in this country, in just a few days’ time? Progress. What a concept.
It was pretty clear you were quoted-by-fragment, Brad. The article was obviously quickly done – good for the NYTimes – and thus the quotes only scratched the surface. Besides, if a “liberal” sounds slightly skeptical about it, it must be a good bill by the media’s standards, right? Also, Barbara Boxer got a really good statement in, that is right on the money, I think.
If the feds can manage with this bill to compensate for a large number of their HAVA errors, the locals will have to stop passing the buck (literally…) for the dismal state of the basic machinery of democracy in this country.
Someone (I know BBV.org has a start on it) should make provision for training and implementing paper ballot counters, if Brad and his miracle-workers do succeed in ushering this bill into law. I certainly hope Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi put their full weight behind the effort to pass this vitally important legislation.
Hey Brad -Way to Go!!!
Peter in Oregon, home of the mailin ballot
Lou Dobbs’s comments haven’t hurt any, either. But with six weeks to go, can this be done anywhere in time?
I believe that the best way to educate and motivate the public to increase voter participation and to improve the accuracy of the election process is a nationwide vote2win compaign. A nation version of Mark Osterloh’s idea that I started cirulating last November.
NOW posted at http://vote2win.blogspot.com
And
http://sourcecode.freespeech.org/submission:
And
http://spaces.msn.com/vote2win/
And
http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/idea/2101
{Ed note: Then it doesn’t need to be copied and repasted here. Please do not do so. Thanks! Rest of comment removed. – BF}
{Ed note: Obnoxious, disinfo comment deleted.}
Here’s why we NEED paper ballots. In 2004, only in paper ballot states did the exit polls closely matched the votes.
It’s easy to understand why. Paper ballots can’t be messed with, unlike levers, punch cards, DREs and Optical scanners.
Here is a chart of the mix of voting machines used in each state. The numbers are an approximation of the deviations from the exit poll to the vote for each type. We assume the results are proportional to the percentage mix of voting machines used in the precincts.
In NY, 99% of the precincts used levers.
In FL, a nearly equal mix of DREs and optiscans.
In OH, 75% punched cards/levers, 25% DREs/optiscans
http://www.geocities.com/electi...Deviations.png
Ronny Reagan Republican: Yes…since the “butterfly” paper ballots were a debacle, you figured it out…what we really wanted were elections to be stolen on e-vote machines. THAT is what we really wanted. What an idiot!
FYI: People in Florida complained about paper BUTTERFLY ballots…GET YOUR F***ING FACTS STRAIGHT, ASSHOLE!
btw? When your on the unemployment line in this “great” economy, you can thank the Reagan administration for starting the tax on unemployment. Another “great” Republican, with the average American’s interest at heart…
Not that uninformed (and willing to show it) idiots like Ronald Republican will be swayed by the actual facts, some of which BIG DAN has already pointed out to him but it should be pointed out, as RFK, Jr. did in his recent article in Rolling Stone Magazine (Will The Next Election Be Hacked?), it was actually faulty electronic voting machines in Florida that started the whole 2000 election debacle in the first place and I’ll quote from that article:
SEND THIS TO YOUR COUNTY’S BALLOT PRINTERS !!
Call your County Clerk/Auditor’s Office first thing in the morning and get the name and address of the company that prints your county’s absentee ballots (CA has the list of them on the SOS’s website.) They stand to profit enormously from this should it pass.
Send them a copy of this bill and highlight the part where HAVA will reimburse the county for actual costs or seventy-five cents per ballot. Ballot printers have the ear of the County Clerks/Boards of Elections and undoubtedly easy access to lobby congress.
BTW, guys. Please consider using the “EMAIL IT” link on the NYTimes story itself. That’s one way to get the attention of their editors that folks care of stories of this type!
Go to the NYTimes story, click the E-MAIL link you’ll find on that page!
JStraight #9
Good point! Money talks in this country, no matter who you are! Get those ballot vendors hopping!
Brad:
Congradulations on getting this idea going! I was thinking since they changed the name of the bill, they wouldn’t give you credit, but looks like I was wrong. This might actually work with enough activism throughout November! All we should need to do is convince every single Democrat to vote on paper. That would be huge!
After November, the next project should be to chide the dicken’s out of any congressman who opposed such legislation in the wake of what we all know is going to be an ELECTION DEBACLE!
God I hope this gets thru as a mandate… I’m also thinking that any resistance to the “Let America Vote” Act, which presumably will come from the so-right-they’re-wrong Republicans, can be used against them in the elections- which of course won’t matter if the amendment doesn’t pass- but just to bring this issue into the MSM spotlight, where it belongs, would be something… you’re a hero, Brad, and a true patriot for keeping this issue alive for so long behind the scenes, if not for you, and a few others, who knows how long the shennanigans would go on undetected by these election-stealing bastages. Thank You.
Hope is a great thing!
Congratulations, Brad and to the folks at Blackbox and the Velvet Revolution. It has taken two or more years to this point. The local MSMs still don’t get it. This legislation is the best available counter to the crappy electronic voting devices.
Next might be setting Federal Standards for state election officials involved with elections to federal office.
They’re going to have that “paper trails” hearing on Thursday in Washington. Information follows.
I was thinking the elephant in the room would be Bob Ney showing up drunk, but now I’m thinking it will be:
“THE BRAD BILL”
Gonna be kind of hard to ignore that! Especially if Rush Holt shows up and can stay this time, Huh?
Very timely Brad!
I hope C-SPAN covers this one also. It was hard trying to hear what was said on the webcast.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
WASHINGTON “”The Committee on House Administration will conduct a hearing on verification, security, and paper records for our nation’s electronic voting systems. The hearing will be held at 10 a.m., Thursday, September 28, 2006, in room 1310 of the Longworth House Office Building.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
What: Committee on House Administration””Hearing
Topic: Electronic voting machines: verification, security, and paper trails
Witnesses:
*
Edward W. Felten, Professor, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University
*
Gary Smith, Election Director, Forsyth County, Georgia
*
Barbara Simons, Member, U.S. Public Policy Committee, Association for Computing Machinery
*
Keith Cunningham, Election Director, Allen County, Ohio
*
James Dickson, Vice President of Government Affairs, American Association of People with Disabilities
*
Michael I. Shamos, Professor, Institute for Software Research Director, Carnegie Mellon University
Time: 10:00 a.m. ““ 12:00 p.m.
Where: Committee on House Administration Hearing Room
1310 Longworth House Office Building
The hearing will be available via live webcast on the Committee website, http://cha.house.gov. For more information, please contact the Committee press office at (202) 225-8281.
Hope is a great thing!
you said it !
Brad you are THE media.
Is that a tsunami I see coming…
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2...true-american/
or …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a2i7tefylQ
Brad, Thanks for the suggestion. I just emailed this message to my county clerk:
Dear County Clerk,
Here is an article from today’s New York Times describing the contingency paper ballot legislation in the U.S. Senate and House that I spoke to you about last night.
The bill itself is only 3 pages long. It’s been dubbed the “Let America Vote Act” (LAVA) and “No Voter Left Behind Act,” but congress is now informally referring to it as the “Confidence in Vote Act of 2006.”
The bill is an amendment to HAVA. It calls for the full reimbursement of atual ballot costs, but no more than seventy-five cents per printed ballot, to any county that provides paper ballots at the polls. The ballots may be used as either a contingency ballot, in case of voting machine failure, or at the request of voters if they simply prefer them. In other words, the county WILL be reimbursed for their costs even if NO voting machines fail during the election. The only requirement is that a notice be posted at each polling place to let voters know that these contingency paper ballots are available.
This is an incredible boon for our county. I hope you will contact each Utah Senator and Congressman to encourage them to vote for passage of this bill. There is no time to lose, though, as Congress will recess this Friday and not reconvene until after the November elections.
Sincerely,
JStraight
P.S. I will send you a separate email with the bill attached.
Kudos to you Brad! Thank you for all your hard work!
Just called my representative and one senator to urge them to vote positive on this legislation. The clerks answering the phones had no idea about the legislation. I urge you to contact your congressmen and inform them of the legislation. Does anyone have the offical number of the proposed legislation?
MMIIXX #16
That is such a great video – I saw the you-tube version – I highly recommend it to everyone here and it should be required viewing for every one!
DO WE HAVE A SPONSOR IN THE HOUSE YET?
Nothing happens without BOTH houses, and, of course, the big question is whether Rove will risk having Bush veto if it actually manages to pass.
But, we are way ahead of ourselves if we don’t even have a house bill yet.
I think there are many congresspeople who will CO-sponsor, but we have to have a bill.
Getting the corporate media or so called corrupt elected majority in Washington to do something about our Democracy in crisis has been like standing in the path of a public transportation bus that refuses to stop for you EVEN THOUGH IT’S THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO STOP AND PROVIDE THE PUBLIC WITH TRANSPORTATION.
Props to you Brad, Velvet Revolution and all the people involved with finally getting these folks on board HOWEVER, nothing passed still = zero (a big goose egg on election day) so watch how the U.S. CONGRESSIONAL SELLOUTS and COMPLICENT ROBOTS VOTE. These humans will make the final decision and their VOTE will be recorded.
On Florida: Of coarse there is some Florida loop hole allowing legitimate paper ballots to count. Speaking of records, how will the duche bag Carl Rove and the Bushit boys continue their undefeated record of stealing Florida elections if actual votes can be legitimately counted. This is an important election to hijack with criminal lier dirtbag Tom Feeney up for re election and former Sec of State Katherine Harris running as a right wing neo-con poster girl. She had no problem holding the cookie jar open for George W. and Jeb to ensure all Florida’s electoral votes went to Bush in 2000 and Al Gore has been working on the Global Warming crisis ever since.
{Ed note: disinformation deleted. –99}
NO, ShopRight, YOU HAVE IT WRONG.
It was the REPUGS who pushed for electronic voting, and it was the CRIMINAL BOB NEY who was the main author of the wrongly named Help America Vote act, who forced this crap through with the help of his FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF WHO IS NOW A DIEBOLD LOBBYIST.
Discover the facts before you go around regurgitating your disinfo. Or maybe you really believe the pablum that your fake news sources tell you. Get the facts, not the spin. YOUR MASTERS ARE LYING TO YOU.
IF YOU DON’T SUPPORT A PAPER-BALLOT BACKUP SYSTEM FOR ALL LEGITIMATE, ELIGIBLE AMERICAN VOTERS TO ENSURE THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE AND THEIR RIGHT TO HAVE THAT VOTE COUNTED ACCURATELY AND HONESTLY, then YOU DON’T DESERVE TO BE AN AMERICAN.
When voters get turned away in droves at the polls on Nov. 7th due to MALFUNCTIONING MACHINES, THEY WILL HAVE GROUNDS FOR CONTESTING THE ELECTION RESULTS.
Don’t believe me, ShopRight? Are you even still reading? Then check out all the stories on the machine malfunctions that melted down the primaries in just the last two weeks (more can be found here on the extensive coverage of BRAD BLOG, but somehow I doubt you’ll bother).
{Ed Note: Darn! I was hoping to have gotten the disinformation off the page before anyone had to work up a sweat to combat it. Sorry, Des. –99}
Shopright? Your comment barely deserves acknowledgement in its ignorance of the following facts of electronic voting: i will not cover the massive humanistic fraud which ocurred in Florida however, i recomend the movie American Blackout.
1. recent elections have been hacked to steal election. THE NUMBERS DO NOT MATCH>
2. these voting machines can be hacked into to change votes easily in less than 5 minutes. Did you ever hear of Blackbox Voting, the Hersti test, the U of Princeton test????
3. One person can change the outcome of an election switching votes undetected.
4. 22 states have electronic voting machines without even a paper ballot trail for a meaningful recount.
5. Electronic voting machines are run by convicted felons who count the vote in secrecy and OBVIOUS to those who have studied the evidence are aware that the BUSHIT administration in office used hacked votes to win in the 2004 Presidential victory. And countless #’s of problems in electronic voting machines used in elections since then as covered daily by bradblog. Not to leave out the Bilbray – Bushby – Hastert FASCIST controlled election.
All thinking AMERICANS (YOU TYPICAL UNINFORMED DEMOCRATIC PARTY FINGER POINTING TWIT looking to turn this into a partisan issue) who understand the facts as presented TODAY wants at the least that their vote is COUNTED CORRECTLY and can be EVIDENCED. Since mass media was clearly in distorting the fix of the 2004 Presidential election, it’s been up to an bradbloggers and other concerned citizens giving their time to expose the truth about our democracy in crisis on less than a shoe string budget of private contribution. This is without little to no documented help monetary or otherwise until very recently by the DEMOCRATIC PARTY. The majority in the Bushit administration is no more looking to correct this problem than a solution to the Global Warming Crisis which these greedy oil barron do not even publicly acknowledge.
Start reading the archieves here DUMBASS!
Much LOVE too ALL that made this happen.
There’s a lot of problems in the USA.
It’s high time we clean out the corruption.
It’s high time to revoke security clearances for the corrupt oath breakers.
How about another CALL TO ARMS ACT after this one.
The DONT BREAK THE OATH ACT.
life imprisionment for oath breakers.
With Redundant, reverse time-line.
With reverse everything.
Un-Do EVERYTHING that messed up the Consitution and Bill of Rights in the United States, it’s Territories, and Districts.
Un-Do EVERYTHING that is planning on a SHADOW GOVERNMENT.
PS: http://pss.gov
Now I got to go work on my show, and add some more myspace friends to /sacxtra. It’s just that simple.
We don’t need death squads breaking the Geneva convention by heating up spoons and removing eye-balls, or vice-grips and propane torches, or drills and brains!
I’ll be the leader.
So let it be.
SO SHALL IT BE ! ! !
psps: My website is still under a mail DOS
Excuse Me
The documents, a total of about 1,000 pages, are among the first to be released to Corsi through his FOIA request to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP, which describes itself as an initiative “to increase security and to enhance prosperity among the three countries through greater cooperation.”
http://SPP.GOV
okay nn
God Bless lilo of freenode
/quit
I can’t beleive I just left a comment on YouTube, but I couldn’t take some of the things they were saying about Olberman.
My understanding is that this “legislation” only encourages elections officials to make paper ballots available.
If that is the case, then I am not impressed. More like disgusted.