Ion Sancho Issues Statement Supporting HR 550

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Ion Sancho Issues Statement Supporting HR 550

By Ion Sancho, Supervisor of Elections, Leon County Florida
April 08, 2006

The HR 550 Lobby Days brought to DC not only passionate citizens interested in e-voting reform but also election officials who have been forced into technology battles that they never wanted to fight. Participating in the Lobby Days events today is Ion Sancho, Supervisor of Elections of Leon County Florida. Sancho, as those who follow e-voting issues may recall, organized a series of tests of Diebold's touchscreen voting technology that (once again) exposed a series of serious vulnerabilities.

Sancho issued the follow statement in conjunction with a press conference that took place this morning:

"The independent authority of election officials to provide honest and impartial elections conducted in a fair and efficient manner is under attack today. Partisan politicians in conjunction with some voting machine vendors are taking away the right of American citizens to cast their votes and have them verified as accurate. Congressman Holt's bill is how we must begin to protect our votes and end the erosion of public trust in our elections."

http://votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1167&Itemid=26

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

1. Nancy Pelosi joins list of co-sponsors

And Nancy Pelosi is a new co-sponsor today.

Vote Trust USA got 9 new sponsors for federal legislation for verified voting for
all 50 states, 3 were republicans. Nancy Pelosi is a new sponsor and will probably
help us get more.

HR 550 Collects Nine New Co-Sponsors As Citizens Come To DC To Demand Verifiable Elections
New from National Issues - Federal Legislation
By I Count Coalition
April 08, 2006
Over the past two days, hundreds of citizens from across the country participated in a the I Count Lobbys Days in support of Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (HR 550). Meetings has been arrranged in 117 Congressional offices on Thursday afternoon and during the day Friday but already by mid -afternoon Thursday, Rep. Jim Leach (R-IA) agreed with activists representing Iowans for Voting Integrity that the nation needs the election safeguards that HR 550 would provide.

By the time Rep. Holt (D-NJ), and HR 550 co-sponsors Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), and Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) spoke at a press conference on Friday morning, the number of new co-sponsors had risen to eight. New endorsements came from Rep. Ray LaHood (R-IL, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Rep. Tim Holden (D-PA), Rep. Steven Lynch (D-MA), and Rep. Ben Chandler (D-KY). As the final meeting was concluding at the end of Friday afternoon, the call came from Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had brought the total co-sponsorship of HR 550 to 177.

More here:

http://votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1166&Itemid=26

[Bill Bored]

2. Wow! Does Bev Harris know about this?

Her support is the true test of any Election Integrity bill, isn't it?
:sarcasm:

Who does Ion Sancho think he is anyway? Apparently, he didn't check with his minder, Bev Harris, before he decided to support Holt's bill. The nerve of some people!

Who cares what Ion Sancho thinks? Just because he's willing to put his job and reputation on the line to prove that our voting systems suck doesn't give him the right to contradict Bev Harris, does it?

Oh sorry, I forgot, Ion Sancho is just an insider.

Besides, anyone could allow a computer geek like Hursti to hack his voting systems! But only Bev Harris can explain election reform to the masses with such tantalizing metaphors as that "little man in the ballot box" and the latest one: resistant bacteria! That really gets the person on the street to think seriously about election reform, doesn't it?

I didn't realize DUers were so fickle either; Holt used to be all the rage! And speaking of fickle, did you know that HR 550 has TWICE the auditing mandated by the state of California, the home of the greatest Secretary of State ever to hold the office, Kevin Shelley? What's up with that?

Doesn't BBV.org have a presence in the Golden State? How come they couldn't get more than a piddly 1% audit there after all these years of hacking, lawsuits, publicity, whistle blowers, etc? Could it be because they're just...outsiders?

Look people, HR 550 could prevent the theft of all but some close elections. If we spin this right, people will see the VVPATs on the machines and think twice about WTF is going on inside. They will start to take this problem seriously. That sets the stage for future reform and makes some of the most blatant fraud a lot more difficult to pull off. The bill isn't perfect, but it's a start. It's up to us whether to build on it or not.

Instead of arguing about this, we should be writing our talking points for the next round of election reform. HR 550, if implemented, will put this shit on the front page and in every polling place! We can use that. That may be the true value of the bill. It's only a placebo if we swallow it like one.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Bill, I don't understand your point in paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Really, your sarcasm is too thick. I don't know what you're saying.

HR 550 has several excellent provisions with fairly tight (but not airtight) language: 1) A real paper ballot; 2) banning of secret software and wireless/internet (but it says for voting "machines" not voting "systems" and could mean retaining secret software and/or wireless/internet in the central tabulators--which some think is the major problem--bill is unclear); and 3) it is effective immediately (for '06 elections).

But HR 550 also has some flaws and perils: 1. Worthless, even harmful, auditing provisions. And re audits it says "unannounced" in one place and "announced" in another (contradictory) 2. Institutionalizes the EAC--trend toward federalization/centralization of elections, very dangerous (plus currently Bush appointed). 3. Further institutionalizes electronic voting--without addressing all potentially serious problems.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing the bill, and trying to improve it. You react to this as if that were bad.

I have a political worry about HR 550--pushing it at the present time--and that is that I don't think it will make it through this illegitimate fascist Congress without harmful amendments that will turn it into the worthless piece of crap that HAVA was (worthless to us, but worth billions to Bushites and warmongers). I don't particularly trust the sponsors to keep it in tact--and I certainly have well-founded concerns about the Dem leadership having the power to keep it in tact, or even giving a damn. I think Congress will weaken it (if it gets anywhere at all), and then most of the sponsors will "sell" it as election reform--use it as a "feather in their cap" even if it's crippled.

Additional worry: I just hate the trend toward centralization and harmful "efficiency." It's killing our democracy.

Here is considerable discussion about all these matters, pro and con--the main part of the discussion devoted to the lousy audit provisions of HR 550, which needed to be fixed:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x421136

[Wilms]

4. I don't think Bill is critical of criticism.

I think he's criticizing the criticism of the bill.

And his point seems as valid as Land Shark's, though they obviously differ.

One thing we haven't really looked at is what are the chances of it being passed at all. You make a really good point suggesting the bills chance for passage improves as it's watered down and otherwise harmed through amendments.

[Bill Bored]

5. I am aware of these problems and it's still better than what you have

in CA right now in that the HR 550 audit is twice the size of CA's audit, is it not? Suppose you combine that with CA's 1%? You get 3%. So by passing HR 550, you triple the size of the CA audit. If you can do that on your own, go ahead. But then why hasn't it been done already? Does someone in CA think 1% is acceptable? If not, where's the bill to increase the size of the audit?

And when is the 1% CA audit announced? I'm not sure but I think it might be a couple of weeks before it actually happens. Am I wrong?

If you peruse the other threads on this, you'll see that I have concerns similar to yours about the bill. But there are a lot of good provisions in there that if implemented will raise public consciousness by putting VVPATs on every DRE. That will cause a lot more people to question the machines than if we do nothing, and that includes some losing candidates who might ask for REAL audits and REAL recounts if the margin is close enough for the fraud to evade the 2% audit. And remember, it only takes ONE SPREADSHEET to show that this could happen.

Do you think if John Kerry had been shown one spreadsheet that proved he had a fair chance of winning Ohio with a proper recount, that he wouldn't have fought for it? But at the time, the numbers weren't there. There was no audit, or at least not a public one, and there were some machines with no paper that couldn't be audited and there were all kinds of other tactics used. And yes, they had plenty of paper ballots there too, but they didn't help.

I am for the bill, but not exactly as written. I'm hopeful that it can be improved in committee and that if it's made worse by the likes of Feney, et al, it will be killed in the Senate. Read my comments in the other threads.

As far as Bev Harris, who is the target of my sarcasm, why isn't she writing a better bill like many of the activists in other states have tried to do and sometimes succeeded in doing? Sorry but I don't trust her any more than I trust that little man in the ballot box. The Hursti hack was an interesting diversion, but because of the way it's been handled, all it's really done is discredit optical scanners, which I believe are still safer than DREs.

And the state of Florida STILL isn't allowed to count their paper ballots by hand, which was supposed to have been the point of the exercise, wasn't it? I can tell you from reading a GEMS manual that that exercise could have been carried out in a way that would have been a lot less risky to Mr. Sancho.

[Kelvin Mace]

6. IHis criticism is aimed at Bev Harris (aka Bev Dudley)

and her minions, who oppose the bill.