Guest Blogged by Emily Levy of VelvetRevolution.us with additional reporting by Brad Friedman
During a question and answer period after a speech at a Black History Month event last night sponsored by the University of California Santa Cruz, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) announced that she plans to withdraw her co-sponsorship of Rep. Rush Holt’s Election Reform Legislation, (HR 811).
Citing the bill’s failure to require paper ballots, allowing for uncounted “paper trails” instead, Waters replied to a question of mine that she would be “glad to withdraw [her] name from the bill” when she returns to Washington on Tuesday in the wake of recent conversations she’s had in California with Election Integrity advocates. The announcement drew an enthusiastic round of applause from those in attendance at Tuesday night’s 23rd Annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Convocation at UCSC which was keynoted by Waters.
Waters would be the first of the bill’s current 192 House co-sponsors to withdraw her support. (The full list of current co-sponsors is available here.) Given her leadership on civil rights and election-related issues over the years, Waters’s move could be significant in the current debate which has seen Democrats and a number of their public-advocacy group supporters use the issue of civil rights, ironically enough, to support the continued use of DRE/touch-screen systems as allowed by the Holt legislation.
As The BRAD BLOG reported yesterday, “language minority” activists have contended that touch-screen systems are better able to serve voters whose first language is not English. That, despite any empirical evidence in support of the notion.
The Holt bill had received early support from a number of Democratic public-advocacy groups such as PFAW, MoveOn, Common Cause, and others, though the controversial bill has gone on to draw criticism, since it’s filing, from Election Integrity advocates here at The BRAD BLOG and elsewhere for its failure to fully ban disenfranchising DRE/touch-screen voting systems and several other notable concerns.
Waters began her speech Tuesday Night by discussing the dire condition of our election system, asking, “What would Dr. Martin Luther King say” about the 2000 election in Florida, about the purging of supposed felons from voter rolls, about proposed voter ID cards, intimidation at the polls in Florida and Ohio, voting machines without “paper trails,” and related issues. She did not discuss HR 811 during the course of her main address.
In the brief question and answer period following her speech, I asked Waters if she was aware that the Election Integrity movement — the folks who have investigated, exposed, and challenged the horrors of electronic voting — strongly opposed Holt’s legislation.
“What would it take,” I asked, “for you to withdraw your support?” …
“It takes me getting to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday morning,” she replied before detailing her reasons for the move. (The transcript of her complete response to my question is posted at the end of this article.)
Waters explained that she had spoken to Ed Asner’s wife [activist Cindy Asner] over the weekend and had come to understand that “paper trails” — which she had previously focused on — would not solve the problems of electronic voting.
“I think you are absolutely correct,” Waters said about my expressed concerns about HR 811. The audience applauded her declaration that she would be “glad to withdraw” her sponsorship of the bill because, she said, she believes “we have got to take a strong stand now against all the machines and go for the paper ballot.”
While originally focusing on “paper trails” as the solution to the nation’s storied electoral system woes, Waters explained that she “forgot that the commission that we put together” to oversee these issues previously was overseen by George W. Bush.
“The president has the most appointments,” she said in reference to commissioners on the much-criticized-of-late U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), which was formed by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.
“I don’t know why I expected that he would actually do the work of setting standards,” she added, decrying the notable lack thereof, as has been evidenced during the nearly five years since the commission began its work.
The original Bush-appointed chair to the EAC, Rev. DeForest Soaries, resigned from the commission in 2005, protesting the lack of interest from both the White House and the then-Republican Congress for real election reform.
“There are no standards,” Soaries explained in an unaired network interview, portions of which The BRAD BLOG ran exclusively in August of 2006. The electoral system “in this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud,” concluded the former commissioner.
A continuing series of recent investigative reports on the EAC by The BRAD BLOG over the last several weeks and months concerning problems at the secretive, ineffective, and politically compromised commission indicate that conditions have not improved since Soaries’s departure.
Waters has been the Chair of the Democratic Caucus Special Committee on Election Reform and is a past Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. She is also a national board member of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) and expressed that she considers voting rights and voter access to be high priorities.
The BRAD BLOG has contacted Waters’ office for an official statement on her plans, but have not yet received one. The Congresswoman is en route to New Orleans where she will be holding “field hearings” on Hurricane Katrina reconstruction under her role as chair of the Housing sub-committee of the House Financial Services Committee. We’ll update this story as appropriate if we receive such a statement.
VotersUnite.org and a growing number of other Election Integrity organizations and individuals who had been supporters of the previous version of Holt’s legislation in the last Congress have withheld support for the latest version, choosing instead to recommend several Essential Revisions to HR 811 in hopes of seeing it amended.
As well, more than 40 non-partisan Election Integrity organizations have issued an Open Letter to Congress demanding a paper ballot — one that will actually be tabulated — for every vote cast in America. You may send that Paper Ballot Campaign letter to your Congress members by clicking here.
# # #
USCS tells us that a podcast of Waters’s entire speech will be made available online via their Currents Online website. The congresswoman’s transcribed response to my question about what it would take for her to withdraw her sponsorship from the Holt bill follows below…
…
I did co-sponsor that bill because I was focused on having a paper trail. I was focused on having a paper trail because I really did assume for the time that we had put all of this money into the states in order for them to develop their technology and to get new machines, and I guess we had some expectations that we would have some standards, but I forgot that the commission that we put together in voter reform really is a commission where the president has the most appointments. And I don’t know why I expected that he would actually do the work of setting standards so we wouldn’t have all these different kinds of machines operating in different ways in the states.
But I think you are absolutely correct and this conversation took place on Sunday. And I will be talking with Holt and I’ll be glad to withdraw my name from the bill because I do believe, I do believe that we have got to take a strong stand now against all the machines and go for the paper ballot. (applause)
I hope Representative Waters would be willing to propose an amendment banning DREs and requiring real paper ballots, rather than simply withdraw her support for HR 811.
Great work, Brad. I think you and the Voter Integrity groups have found an influential spokeswoman in Rep. Waters. If she can’t get the Rush bill modified before it comes to a vote on the floor, I hope she will be able to offer amendments to it in order to make it a true improvement over what we have now. Floor speeches will draw some attention to what thinking people see as its defects.
To others… Have you supported Brad with a donation this month? How about writing your thank you on the picture of Andrew Jackson on a $20 bill.
Ooops! Thank you Ms. Levy
This Holt bill HR 811 aka 550 belongs in the circular frickin file. Even with it’s stupid modifications!
Good on Maxine Waters. Finally DUMP PAPER TRAAAAIIIIILLLLS…
Now please say,
“PAPER BALLOTS HAND COUNTED ”
How about someone else besides Holt write a bill? I am sick of his bills. A bill with words, the electronics are REMOVED ENTIRELY from the COUNTING PROCESS.
PAPER BALLOTS HAND COUNTED, CITIEN OVERSIGHT, NO BACKROOM HIDDEN CRAP, NO NATIONAL SECURITY / DHS HIDDEN RED ALERTS.
I’ll ask the folks here a second time.
(I didn’t get any feed back at all the last time I asked.)
Is everyone now thinking that Optical Scanners are acceptable way to count?
And if you answered yes to this, I ask you why?
I ask, and want to know, because it sure the hell don’t make no sense to me, you’d pay for a stupid electronic machines, which can have failures, be hacked and tampered with, cost tons in repairs, cost more when the wrong person is elected, when you could just buy a steel box to place the ballots in, and hand count the damn result.
What worries me currently. I hear echo’s out there
” paper ballots is not currently an option, this is the best we can get. ”
I ain’t gonna say who said it or where I heard it. . . . Thats your homework. If you dare.
My Answer: NO I’m sorry it’s not the best we can expect, the best we can expect is to do the right thing and get these damn electronics out of the counting.
And if I am the only damn person in this country that still thinks all these bills, mods, amendments, electronics, and software suck and are wrong to be used in our elections. If I am the _only_ one. Then I need to find something else to do, because this game is up, and I have lost everything here. Don’t waste my time. I won’t waste yours voting in your new failed system.
And all this time the spirit of HAVA has still not been met. Who has made an ballot printing interface for the totally paralised who can only suck on a tube? If you want to use some god damn electronics, use it there, to help them print a paper ballot. Use it for GOOD, not EVIL.
I am really wondering if I am still in the same place, I ask myself should I be here anymore, if everyone has finally given in and want’s to use electronics to count? (When I say everyone, your gonna have to do some homework to figure out what I mean.) This isn’t a question. This is more a rationalization for myself I guess. If the war against failed electronic voting machines is lost, I might as well make plans to do something else with my remaining time. Something that does not cause me so much pain and frustration.
It will be easier to just not vote.
And Not call senators again and again and again and again and again and again.
Phil:
My exact answer to your question was posted yesterday here. Comment #13.
Maxine Waters said:
“I do believe that we have got to take a strong stand now against all the machines and go for the paper ballot.”
Couldn’t agree with you more, and THANK YOU for always being there for us and our issues!
In response to those here calling for all Hand Counted Paper Ballots, I’ll quote from a quick reply I made on a previous thread in that regard (with more to come on it in the future, no doubt):
I’ll add to that to say, I think HCPB folks would be wise to join in the call to require that Holt be amended to outlaw DRE’s and require a paper BALLOT for every vote cast.
It seems to me if we keep approving and endorsing flawed bills, the end result will be something like this
free proxy server anyone?
If it reaches that point I don’t see the point in voting at all.
Democracy NOW!’s coverage of Maxine Water’s speech at the anti-war rally…watch it on video…
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow...38;start=13:20
transcript…
http://www.democracynow.org/art...ad&tid=25
REP. MAXINE WATERS: You have come here today to save your country, to change the direction of this country and to tell George Bush, “Hell, no, we won’t go!” I stand firmly with you. My name is Maxine Waters, and I’m not afraid of George W. Bush. My name is Maxine Waters, and I’m not intimidated by Dick Cheney. My name is Maxine Waters, and I I helped to get rid of Rumsfeld. My name is Maxine Waters, and Condi Rice is nothing but another neocon, and she doesn’t represent me!
George W. Bush led us into this immoral war. He tricked the American people, and he told us there were weapons of mass destruction. He did not tell the truth. He came out on the battleship and said, “Mission accomplished.” He misled us again. He said we were working with the coalition of the willing. It was only a figment of his imagination. He said that we were moving forward with training the Iraqi soldiers who would take over the security. Where are they? They are nowhere. As a matter of fact, they’re undermining our soldiers in this civil war. He said we were going to get proceeds from the oil that would be pumped back into Iraq so that it could be reconstructed. As a matter of fact, he told us he made these decisions; he said he is the decider. But you know what? He’s not the decider. He is the liar!
Thank you for being here today. I want you to come to Capitol Hill and lobby on Monday and put some starch in the backs of the members of Congress and give them the courage that they need to do the right thing. It is alright to have some resolutions that are not binding, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that will come when it’s time to decide whether or not we’re going to fund this immoral war. I will not vote one dime for this war! And when you come up here to lobby, you ask these members, “Are you going to support an appropriation to continue this war, to expand this war?” And you can tell the difference between those who are ready to bring our soldiers home and those who are only paying lip service. Don’t forget, he is not the decider. He is the —
If you watched ANBCBSNNX, you saw William Kristol’s views, not Maxine Waters…someone we elected to something. ANBCBSNNX likes to show Republican strategists and former Republicans like New Gingrich, not elected officials like Maxine Waters and Bernie Sanders. If you watch ANBCBSNNX, you might thing William Kristol and New Gingrich are presently in congress, and you never heard of Maxine Waters and Bernie Sanders.
Are folks saying forget removing electronics?
I am really confused here with the Essential Revisions
My intuition says, something’s screwed the pooch here.
If that be the case, then I think I am truly finished with this war on electronic voting.
If you can’t count paper ballots until you have paper ballots, then why doesn’t the bill support paper ballots from the git go? Why introduce errors?
Maybe I am just confused. First I endorsed it, then it was revised. So I yanked my endorsement. And in hindsight, I probably was hasty in endorsing the essential revisions, before they were revised. I got stung by this for being lazy and saying, oh blah has endorsed it it must be okay. My bad. -IMO
Even John asked me to reconsider. I respectfully said no.
I DONT WANT ELECTRONICS IN THE COUNTING BECAUSE I CAN NOT PHYSICALLY SEE ELECTRICITY OR ELECTRICAL SIGNALS.
So figure out how to do that. And I will be happy to endorse it.
As long as votes are being counted electonically, and transmitted across networks, or digitally stored on portable devices, we’re screwed. And I won’t endorse that. I just won’t.
Are we on the same page here?
I really ain’t trying to waste anyones time.
Phil asked:
I concur. It should be amended to require such ballots.
A perfectly legitimate position. Even if amended positively, Holt’s bill would not mandate electronic counting. Once you’ve got a MANDATED paper ballot, however, you can rally for/fight for counting them any way you like in any jurisdiction in the country!
I understand you’d like to make it illegal to count a ballot electronically, and that’s not a ridiculous position. But I hope you’ll consider an incremental process here. Not to sound like the Dems, but I can assure you, there is ZERO political traction ANYWHERE in Congress to require 100% hand-counted paper ballots by federal fiat at this time.
As mentioned, let’s GET paper ballots in all 50 states in a single bound, and then the fight about how they are counted will be far easier to wage.
If the voting machine companies were being honest, we wouldn’t be having any of these problems.
This battle has nothing to do with blind people voting in private because we’re all blind when we vote on them.
The argument that someone is trying to steal copyrighted computer code that constantly counts things wrong is ludicrous.
The paper jam argument died sometime last year because the people making it were tired of being glared at.
But if Brad says our congressmen are determined to waste more of our hard earned money on this nonsense, I trust him. After a year on this blog, I haven’t caught him in a lie yet.
If paper ballots that are counted wrong is the best we can do. Let’s go for it.
Sigh.
My opinion on what Brad is saying is that most of the dumb bastards up in Congress, either knowingly or not, don’t read half of the bills put in front of them in full
If something like hand counted paper legislation gets written into that [Holts] bill, it will stick out like a sore thumb, and it will not go through
As it is now, just banning thousands of DRE machines already in place, costing millions are potentially headed to the scrap heap, that will raise enough eye brows, and that might cause the bill to go down (with Diebolds etc help), most in Congress are not going to vote against a system that got them elected, it must be just fine the way it is in their opinion
Little baby steps is all we can hope for in this process, unless something scandalous breaks out of the darkness
With all of that said, where’s the Kennedy/Pap Qui-tam ?
Perhaps if she waited to withdraw until she submitted her objections and her corrections, it would help move amendments into line.
Then, if Holt et. al. would not go along with her, then she withdraws her sponsorship.
Perhaps it would give a little leverage to first suggest she may withdraw if improvements are not taken seriously.
Sorry all, (I know I am just one idiot out here, think how bad it must be for someone not familiar.)
Welp, from all this, I guess I am still in the right place.
I put a request to John, to re-endorse the essential changes to HR-811. (Sorry John, I won’t change it again.)
It’s just.. man.
All I can say is my first experience with a scanner reading text. It does not do a good job. It has to be manually fixed even when the text was typed it had problems.
Scanning a page is one thing (like in a picture) where you don’t care about extracting sensitive data for use another program, rather to archive the dead trees to a disk; but scanning text e.g. a high (1)/ low (0) signals represented by someone drawing symbols by hand, and expecting that extracted data to be useful is a bad idea.
Before withdrawing support of Holt’s bill HR 811 or urging such it would be well to take a careful look.
Holt has worked hard on the bill and may well be open to amendments that would make withdrawal of cosponsor ship unnecessary.
In fact an orderly looking set of revisions is linked to the primary blog article above.
Voting on a national scale is of course a complicated multivaried enterprise, and it may require different partial solutions in different places or circumstances. Even with the best of intentions we may not be able to get rid of e-voting entirely nationwide in time for the next national election. What then are we to do in this admittedly imperfect but perhaps likely situation?
Hand counting of paper ballots may work fine in small counties with homogeneous populations where there are few challenges involving language or physical limitations. Otherwise the requirements for voting aids may make this seemingly obvious solution incomplete or difficult to implement effectively. Election help appropriate for doing effective hand counts in a timely fashion is becoming scarce. Not everyone wants to count ballots or work under the intense time pressures of getting results out quickly.
Optical scanners performance is not problem free either. In my county alone (Beaver County PA) they have jammed in two separate elections causing delays that bothered significant players in this time pressured age. The PA Governor’s office even called Beaver County about the delay in the last Federal Congressional contest. Certain paper ballots could not make it through the machines without paper jams and delays to all the results.
We need to improve current voting, but it’s not going to be perfect. Like many other things in our system of government voting requires vigilance. As they sometimes say ‘,This is what democracy looks like.’
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s work hard to improve Holt’s bill before tossing it out.
Holt is that congressional rarity a scientist — in fact a Ph.D. in physics. His stock and trade are understanding what is going on and making things work. Sometimes that takes a little patience and several stages of development.
It doesn’t have to be a complex solution. Keeping it simple will work fine. Require paper ballots for ALL 50 STATES. Don’t hide the ballots. Make them accessible for ALL to be able to see their vote and openly verify it was counted in the election.
Peter W. Deutsch said in #17…
“Election help appropriate for doing effective hand counts in a timely fashion is becoming scarce.”
So, hire some people and pay them. I estimate there are 150,000 voting places in the USA for a general election. I don’t know if this number is correct, but I base it on 435 congressional districts, and 300 voting places per district. (Please correct me if the number is off.) If we hire 3 people per polling place for 2 weeks (1 week training and 1 week counting) at $1,000 per week, that’s $6,000 per polling place. If we add another $4,000 per polling place, for a total of $10K, that’s 1.5 Billion Just for chukles, let’s double it to $3 Billion (since the government can’t spend $1 for less than $2). DONE! We LOSE twenty times that in Iraq in a year to military/industrial graft.
“Not everyone wants to count ballots or work under the intense time pressures of getting results out quickly.”
Let’s remove the pressure. It’s artificial anyway. And, guess what, for $1,000 a week, plenty of people will take the job.
Has Maxine Waters actually gone through with her promise to withdraw her sponsorship?
Don
DonM, in response to my asking Rep. Waters what it would take for her to withdraw her support from HR 811, she said it would take her getting back to Washington D.C. on Tuesday. Tuesday hasn’t come yet, so I don’t believe she has withdrawn. At this point I’d personally prefer that she support strong amendments to HR 811 rather than withdrawing her cosponsorship.
What flaws does HR 811 have that HR 550 did not have?
I find it interesting that Rep. Waters, who after the Florida 2000 fiasco chaired the Democratic Caucus Special Committee on Election Reform (obviously one of the great failed Committee efforts of our times), which “held hearings throughout the country to prepare for Congressional consideration of minimum federal standards for elections practices” (heh) “forgot” that the majority of the members of the EAC…formed as a result of HAVA 2000…were appointed by Bush. Did she forget that Bush has been President since 2000? Or that HAVA (Chris Dodd’s gift to democracy) was passed in 2000?
Free Spirit said:
What flaws does HR 811 have that HR 550 did not have?
In some ways HR 811 is stronger than HR 550.
But that’s not the point. The point is that we have learned. We have overwhelming evidence from 2006 that DREs are a failed experiment, and it isn’t sensible to keep throwing good elections after bad. Before we had so many years of experience with the machines, some were hopeful that vvpat would be a solution, but we can’t ignore the evidence just to stay with a hope that clearly won’t work.
That’s why an amendment banning DREs is crucial.
Once you get hit on the head by too many apples, you should learn that gravity is real and move out from under the tree.
I’m not opposed to banning DREs. I’m adamantly opposed to any effort that might derail our efforts to get voter-verifiable paper audit trails in place in time for the 2008 elections….and I mean all of them, not just the general election.
If the Maxine Waters and PDA want to bet their farms on this one, they can be my guest. But if they do, they better hope like hell that not one single primary vote gets cast on a paperless touchscreen and not one single primary vote gets cast in an election that won’t be subject to an audit.
Personally, I have always been aware of the fact that the Democrats who cosponsored HR 550 did so with confidence that it would never pass. I have been waiting to see who would start to run for cover when Hot was ready to introduce HR 811 in the Democratic-controlled Congress. And who would help to provide them with cover.
I’m making my list, and I will not forget.
I notice that, in explaining why she decided to bail on Holt’s bill, Rep. Waters did not make any reference to lessons learned in 2006. Instead, she attributed her flip flop to a memory lapse that is, to say the least, a little hard to believe. If the former chair of the Democratic Caucus Special Committee on Election really forgot fact that most of the members of the EAC are Bush appointees, maybe it’s time for her to retire.