Iowans Shun Holy Grail
The Holy Grail of paper ballot legislation is HR 550. It is a US House of Representatives bill, introduced by New Jersey’s Rush Holt, a physicist from Princeton. The bill has garnered 159 cosponsors in the House. But none of them are from Iowa.
Holt’s bill does more than require that voters be able to see their votes appear on paper. It also requires election officials to check on the initial machine totals by comparing some actual ballots to the results reported by the machine.
There is no good argument for opposing this bill, except that it may require new equipment and more work by election officials. But it will restore confidence in ballot counting. That confidence is now eroding. We want trustworthy elections, not cheap and easy ones.
There hasn’t been much point in hectoring our Congressional delegation about their lack of interest in this bill. This holy grail was in Bob Ney’s committee and he clearly was not planning to drink from it. With Ney stepping aside this week and a genuine scientist in charge of the committee, the bill has another chance.
That means we have work to do. It is time to contact our Congressmen and find out why they have not yet co-sponsored this ballot protection bill. Why has Steve King sponsored a weaker bill? Why are Leach and Boswell both silent?
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January 18th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
VoteTrustUSA has set up an action alert/petition in support of HR 550. Please visit
http://www.congressweb.com/cweb4/index.cfm?orgcode=VTUSA&hotissue=1
where with one click you can send an email to your Congressman and put your name on a petition that will be deleivered to the House Admin Committee members.
VTUSA, together ith Verified Voting, Common Cause, Electronic Frontier Foundation, VoterUnite and other groups will be sponsoring a double Lobby Day effort in April - In DC and In district. I will be sure to post here when it is announced next week,