Posted on Wednesday, February 07, 2007 - 12:36 pm:
By Nancy Tobi - Chair, Democracy for New Hampshire
You can keep arguing the merits of this audit method or that, this paper trail or that, but the Holt Bill has two poison pills in it that can not be argued away:
1) huge unfunded mandate for text-to-audio conversion technology
2) consolidation of Executive power and control over Federal elections.
We must fight this treasonous bill and call it for what it is: ANTI-DEMOCRATIC.
It is bad enough that the authors of this bill, two years following the NASS resolution to sunset the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), and after more than a years' worth of activist pleadings to get rid of this growing little monster, the EAC, cement it as a permanent Executive agency in his new bill.
Bad enough that the authors of this bill are comfortable handing over control of federal elections to the White House. This is treasonous in and of itself.
But on top of this unseemly and anti democratic motion, the new Holt bill insinuates a whole new technoelection industrial toy into every polling place in the nation.
In the language of this bill, the new accessible voting system
"'(I) allows the voter to privately and independently verify the content of the permanent paper ballot through the conversion of the printed content into accessible media"
Do you want to know what this intentionally benign and vague language means, and the events that led to it being inserted into the Holt Bill? If you ask Holt's office why this mysterious new requirement is in their bill, they're liable to say, "why, it's in the EAC 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG)." So let's take a look at what all of this means, and where it comes from.
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/46649.html