Our group largely sat out the fight for/against HR 5036, Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) "“Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act.”  Repeated experience has shown that lobbying efforts will not result in democratic electoral reform. Which is hardly a surprise. Why, after all, would we expect legislators who owe their status, income, and identity to the current system, however corrupt, to enact laws undermining that system? In the absence of a vast public groundswell, all the pressure points are applied by special interests.

And so it goes with Holt. Fervent Holt bill supporter, Kathy Dopp, who worked very hard to try to ensure adequate auditing provisions, reports on the results. 

From: Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:15 PM
Subject: HR 5036 Auditing provisions Gutted - No longer requires a valid check of unofficial results

Bad news.

I sat down to read HR5036 and found that its auditing provisions have been gutted and no longer require a valid audit of election results.

While the bill still has many excellent provisions, the two committees (House Admin and Technology) seem to have destroyed its election auditing provisions so that the bill no longer requires jurisdictions to conduct any valid checks of the accuracy of the unofficial vote counts in order to obtain funding for their "audits".

I.e. Now the invalid auditing procedures of Utah and Colorado (for two examples) which do not actually check the accuracy of the unofficial vote counts are now funded by the latest version HR5036 - providing no incentive to conduct valid audits.

For instance:

1. the audit units sampled are no longer required to be selected from a publicly released report of all auditable units (precincts or other units) i.e. no auditable public report of vote counts is required so that the audits can be trivially scammed like occurs now in Utah and several states which claim to do audits today but really never compare the results of manual counts with actual reported unofficial tallies, and

2. the States are now allowed to define virtually everything as relates to their audits, and

3. the audit report produced after the audit is also not even required to consist of a list of all unofficial vote counts used to tally the unofficial votes, the manual counts and the discrepancies i.e. the infamous EAC is now allowed to specify the format for the audit report and we know how incompetent the commissioners have been so far, and

4. there is a giant loophole now in the way absentee and provisional ballots are audited that allows precincts to be selected for election day and early audits - and then 12 days or so later, the same precincts can be used to audit absentee and provisional ballots so that the precincts for auditing even though these precincts would be known prior to even counting those provisional and absentee ballots.

This allows all provisional and absentee ballots to be miscounted in all unaudited precincts with complete impunity.  (These two stage audits are absolutely required by this bill's provisions because the bill requires that the audit must begin within 48 hours of polls closing and not all absentee and provisional ballots can be counted by then in most jurisdictions.) Needless to say, allowing all but 2% of all absentee and provisional ballots to be miscounted with impunity allows virtually any election to be fraudulently stolen.

5. The audit amount has been reduced from 3% to a sometimes insufficient overall 2%.

I could go on.  Many of the formerly strong audit provisions of the original HR5036 have been gutted in this version to permit sham auditsv which do almost nothing to ensure the accuracy of the November 2008 election outcomes.

This is very disappointing.

In addition there is an entire section (Section 2b) which has been added (and should be removed) that now funds the addition of ballot printers to DRE machines.

The funding of paper ballots, nontabulating ballot printers, emergency paper ballots, and manual counts is good, but the rest of the bill seems to have been severely gutted in committee.

This is by far the worst version of all the bills with respect to checking the accuracy of election results, including all the various versions of HR811 and HR5036.

Very sad.
Kathy