i am not this body

voting reform bill toes to House floor

The 2007 version of the election reform bill proposed by NJ Rep. Rush Holt is finally about to come to a floor vote in the House.

HR 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act sponsored by Holt and CA Rep. Zoe Lofgren, is far from perfect, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, overall this is a step in the right direction and does much to stop the bleeding - or maybe infection would be a better analogy.

HR 811 would sharply regulate direct recording electronics voting machines, aka DREs. DREs are "Black Box" devices, run on proprietary and secret computer source code. DREs have repeatedly been shown to be hackable, insecure, inaccurate, and just plain tacky.

At their worst, they can rig elections; even in the absence of malice, they just don't work right. They are widely believed to be responsible for botching elections in 2004 and 2006, and generally have no provisions for audits, recounts, or any other of those nice accountability features we've foolishly come to expect from our electoral process.

See EFF's comprehensive analysis of what's good, bad, and fugly about the bill. Then contact your congresscritter and impart them some good guidance on the matter - or else I'll move to your district and run for public office. And that would be bad.

posted by Jon Drucker @ 8:25 AM