I wanted to write something about Andy.

Bill Bored

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Sun Jul-24-05 01:17 AM
Original message

I wanted to write something about Andy.

Edited on Sun Jul-24-05 01:21 AM by Bill Bored

Although I've never met him face to face, there are some things that Andy Stephenson and I were involved in on the Net that should make every partisan freeper who hated him think twice about having done so, even though it's too damn late now.

Just before he got sick, Andy was in the nation's capital lobbying the Senate to pass a bill -- a bill written by a Republican.

The bill is called the "Voting Integrity and Verification Act of 2005" (VIVA 2005), S330, introduced on February 9, 2005 by Senator John Ensign (R) of Nevada. If you don't believe me, you can look it up: <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.330:>

While Andy was in DC, I and a number of others on this forum and elsewhere helped to organize a letter and phone campaign aimed mostly at Republican Senators, to get them to co-sponsor this bill, which essentially would make unverifiable paperless e-voting a thing of the past for all federal elections.

There were many critics of Andy's work and of the bill itself. Most of them were progressive Democrats who felt this bill didn't go far enough. After all, they thought, it was written by a Republican so how good could it be?

VIVA 2005 did nothing to protect voting rights. It mandated no actual hand counting of the voter-verified paper ballots or records it would have created. It did not attempt to amend the Constitution to explicitly guarantee the right to vote, or make Election Day a national holiday. Nor did it ban the writing of e-voting software by convicted felons who themselves aren't even allowed to vote in many states. It didn't even do anything to help blind or physically disabled voters to vote independently -- none of that bleeding heart stuff. All this bill did was to ensure that there would be no more unverifiable elections in our free republic, by creating "an individual paper version of the voter's ballot before the voter's ballot is cast and counted" -- pure and simple.

Andy and others recognized that this bill with its many deficiencies, was a foundation that if made into law, would remove the scourge, uncertainty and risk of "vapor" ballots from our electoral system forever, or at least until someone else decided to screw things up again with a law to allow some new and improved hackable e-voting technology. Andy also recognized that the bill might actually have a chance of passing in a Republican controlled congress, so he was pragmatic about it. After all, the best piece of legislation is useless if it never becomes law. Andy saw the opportunity to achieve something with this bill that had been blocked in congress since the passage of HAVA -- the so called Help America Vote Act -- in 2002: voter-verified paper ballots. And unlike other pending legislation, Republicans against verifiable elections would have to deny passage of this bill to one of their own -- the Republican Senator from Nevada who had authored it.

As you might expect, Andy took a lot of heat form some Democrats for supporting this legislation, especially here on DU.

There was a conference of the Progressive Democrats of America at around the same time (who did not support this bill), and there were other bills being introduced by such luminaries as Sen. Chris Dodd (D - CT) and Rep. John Conyers (D - MI), and a number of other Democrats after the Jan. 6 congressional challenge to the electoral votes of Ohio. All these bills were laudable in their attempts to make the electoral process fair and accessible to all, but they all had loopholes of various shapes and sizes when it came to their voter-verified paper ballot language. Because of this, Andy could not in good conscience support any of these other bills.

So he went to Washington to lobby the Senate to pass a bill written by a Republican.

Meanwhile, back at the Internet, Andy, myself and some others actually debated with an attorney from John Conyers' office about the merits of the legislation before the House and Senate, and why we felt this Republican bill deserved bi-partisan support. Andy called the lawyer on the phone to continue this discussion in DC while he was there. I'm not sure but they may have even met face to face. I know from the DU postings at the time, that this debate became rather tense. There were no hard feelings in the end (I hope), but the fact is that there were times when we all had to simply agree to disagree.

It was a very worthwhile discussion however and it sent a powerful message to Mr. Conyers that while we supported him wholeheartedly in his efforts to reform our elections, there were a few things that could not be compromised. Conyers did get the message as several days later in an interview, he said that he was aware that there were some who favored voter-verified paper ballots along with ANY other solution to benefit disabled voters. I'm not sure if Senator Dodd has come to this realization yet, but then I'm not aware of any of his staffers ever posting on DU or debating Andy Stephenson either.

It was during this trip to DC that Andy began to experience the first symptoms of the pancreatic cancer that would eventually claim his life. A number of us on the board became amateur physicians trying to suggest treatments and calm him down. We did not yet know how serious this was. And later, as the freepers descended upon him to try and discredit his story and his work, those of us who devote most of our attention to the Election Results and Discussion Forum, myself included, were unaware that events had taken such an ugly turn. You see, this forum was Andy's home and it's home to a number of us who believe in what he was doing. And some of those people may even happen to be Republicans.

Now Andy is gone. But when someone tells you that he was a phony, ask yourself how many of those folks would ever support a bill for the good of the country that happened to have been written by a Democrat, and how many of them would go to Washington to lobby for it, and debate senior members of their own party in support of it, all while experiencing the symptoms of a life threatening disease?

If any of those who still believe Andy was a fraud also happen to believe in free, fair and verifiable elections, you might consider supporting that Republican bill, S330, so even you will someday know that your vote might actually be counted as cast. Andy might just rest a little easier that way.