STOP "THE HOLT BILL": SAVE OUR ELECTIONS!

LEGISLATION THREATENING OUR ELECTIONS MAY BE VOTED ON IN CONGRESS THIS WEEK! WE URGENTLY NEED YOUR HELP to CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES AND ASK THEM TO VOTE NO ON H.R. 811!

H.R. 811, ("The Holt Bill"):

1) Cements secret vote counting into law by protecting the proprietary software of electronic voting machines and optical scan counters. How? By making the source code that runs the machines a government-recognized trade secret, available only to "qualified" experts, and then only if a strict nondisclosure agreement is signed!


2) Makes permanent the Election Assistance Commission, a shadow White House agency with four presidential appointees who wield total control over voting system standards. This commission, which was supposed to sunset this year, will have vastly expanded powers over elections from the federal level, extending their authority into state and local elections. This will further remove citizens from the election process, and hand ultimate power over elections to the executive branch.

3) Mandates adding printers to electronic voting machines to create a voter-verified paper trail (deceptively called a "ballot") - which SOUNDS GOOD, but computer programming experts and security engineers agree that it is easy to hack election software to record a vote one way on the paper "trail" while the software is recording the vote a different way. THIS IS WORSE THAN NO "PAPER TRAIL", because relying on audits and recounts is senseless: Both recounts and audits have blatantly been rigged and manipulated.


4) Has many big ticket items that will become "unfunded mandates", such as adding the printers to electronic voting machines, and other technology that has not yet been developed. Estimates for the state of New Hampshire alone indicate it will cost their taxpayers $60 million over the next 20 years. Texas' costs could be two or three times as much.

H.R. 811 threatens the security of our republic by taking elections totally out of the hands of the people. VoteRescue of Austin is asking all concerned citizens to call their representatives today demanding that they "Kill Bill H.R. 811" and support the reintroduction of the Paper Ballot Act of 2006 (formerly H.R. 6200). (For contact information for your representatives, see: www.congress.org )

The new version of H.R. 6200 (to be re-introduced soon by Rep. Dennis Kucinich with a new bill number) will require paper ballots, hand-counted at the precinct level for all federal elections by the 2008 presidential election. It will also guarantee transparent elections in which "citizens are in control", overseeing and participating in the total elections process.

The new H.R. 6200 will DEMONSTRATE A GOVERNMENT OF, FOR AND BY THE PEOPLE!

Many thanks for your help in this very urgent matter.

Vickie Karp, Abbe Waldman DeLozier, Karen Renick, Kathleen Wynne

Coalition for Visible Ballots/VoteRescue.org