SNIP...Today, the Holt bill faces a “fast track” vote in Congress. Essentially this means an up or down vote on a terrible bill, rather than an opportunity to speak in the nation’s most important forum about what may well be the greatest threat to democracy in the history of the republic.
It’s difficult to overstate just how poorly framed the congressional discussion has been. Voting in the US is less meaningful than any democracy in the world, and even less meaningful than most nations which do not call themselves democracies. in all the important criteria by which democracy is measured – voting participation, equality of all citizens in the voting process, fair and impartial administration, representativeness of candidates and officials, accountability for violations of law and the public trust, and most important, integrity, the assurance that votes are in fact counted as cast, the US ranks in the bottom quintile of the world – not just of democracies, but all nations. On the other critical criterion, transparency, the US election system is perhaps the worst the world has ever known. Votes are counted and tabulated in secret using proprietary software without public testing or oversight. The one potential verification tool, a national exit poll, quarantines the results until such time as they can “correct” them so as to conform to the count. Even then, survey results are never made publicly available in a way that would permit them to be used to verify the veracity of the official numbers.
Of course, one would never know this from any US newspaper or any textbook used in any US school or college, but that’s just all the more indicative of the problem.
The democratic republic is in critical condition -- bleeding, bankrupt, obese, and suffering from a malnutrition-induced dementia. And for the remedy, we’re debating whether we to substitute saccharin for sugar in our soft drinks.
There are good people fighting for this bill under the flag of reform, but whether or not congress votes to retrofit DREs to include a VVPAT is quite beside the point. As Kathy Dopp, Brad Friedman, Bev Harris, Paul Lehto, Nancy Tobi, and others have pointed out, the so-called “paper trail” is for all intents and purposes utterly useless. In a California ruling yesterday, a judge declined to access the so-called paper trail even though the election was officially decided by only three votes. (Orange County had spent $12 million on that retrofit.) In every contested election where such a paper trail has been called into question, the paper trail has been too corrupted to use (see for example, Rebecca Mercuri’s testimony on the 2006 Ohio election audit.
http://www.electionintegrity.org/SnatchingDefeat.htm