HR 811 Rep. Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act

Please vote YES HR 811, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007", “NO” on any unfunded mandate amendment, and YES to the “Davis” Amendment.

H.R. 811 is fully funded according to its Congressional Budget Office score. Further, the content of H.R.811 is exempt from the unfunded mandate statute, but that has not stopped the opponents of independent election audits from offering an unfunded mandate amendment that would gut the bill's 2008 deadlines.

HR 811, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007", will not cost any North Carolina Counties including Guilford County anything.

In fact, it could save touch-screen counties (including Guilford and Mecklenburg) money.

By 2012, the touch-screen machines in those 23 counties would be old by industry standards and need to be replaced anyway. This is similar to the aging out of laptop computers.

HR 811 provides the touch-screen counties federal funds to replace their aging touch-screen machines. This is doing them a favor. The 23 touch screen counties can either upgrade or purchase new touch-screen machines that have a durable ballot, or they can upgrade them with a new printer solution if so developed, or they can replace them with the more economical and reliable optical scan systems.

The "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007" (H.R. 811) may be the most important bill Congress could pass this year.

H.R. 811 requires a voter-verified paper ballot be produced for every vote cast beginning with the 2008 elections. The voter-verified paper ballot (VVPB) is the ballot of record for all recounts and audits, as a check on electronic tallies. This is the "bottom line" without which we cannot have reliable elections...

Support the Holt Bill!

We have the opportunity to make sure that we don’t lose anymore votes in 2008. Congressman Rush Holt is introducing a paper trail bill in Congress, but its success depends on the support from other lawmakers this month. Click here to take action.

This bill is now posted to the Library of Congress website. An analysis of this bill will be provided soon on Verified Voting's legislation page.

See if your congressman is a co-sponsor, check our action alert page here.

HR 811: Separating Truth From Fiction in E-voting Reform June 13, 2007 Matt Zimmerman

After years of painstaking lobbying, e-mail and phone campaigns, congressional hearings, and committee markups and amendments, Rep. Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act finally appears poised for a floor vote in the House of Representatives. With an impressive 216 bipartisan co-sponsors, the bill has a real chance of passing. If signed into law, HR 811 would dramatically improve the electoral process in both the short and long term. While it would not solve the immense shortcomings in the current system, HR 811 would take a giant step towards returning much-needed transparency and accountability to the process...

The Campaign For Secure Elections By Lawrence Norden, The Brennan Center for Justice Under Law of New York University
VoteTrustUSA, CA - Holt's bill, the Election Assistance Commission will hold money for testing labs in escrow, and assign testing labs for machine certification at random.

As the presidential candidates' ramp up their campaigns, it's hard to resist asking, 'can't give us a break?' Didn't the last federal election cycle just end? Isn't November 2008 awfully far away?

Perhaps. But there is one campaign for all future federal elections that must begin in earnest immediately. And that is the campaign to make elections as secure and accurate as possible. After Florida's hanging chad debacle in 2000, voting irregularities in Ohio in 2004, and the mysterious loss of 18,000 votes in a House race in Sarasota in 2006, there is little room for another divisive national election marred by voting machine glitches....

Rep. Rush Holt's VCIA Bill is Fair, Necessary and Overdue
VoteTrustUSA, CA - Jun 11, 2007
By Pam smith, President VerifiedVoting.org Since the Help America Vote Act was implemented and electronic voting machines became commonplace, there has been ...

...Our voting systems must provide a recountable, auditable paper record for each ballot cast. Congressman Holt's bill will ensure this in all states, in a reasonable and responsible manner. The sensible and necessary provisions in the bill can and must be implemented before November 2008. Abundant and growing evidence shows electronic systems can malfunction, and paperless electronic systems malfunction irretrievably. To ignore it would be to recklessly gamble with our elections.

Time Has Come for Congress to Help Fix Voting System
VoteTrustUSA, CA - Jun 11, 2007

By Mark Ritchie, Secretary of State of Minnesota
In the House, the bill with the most support and momentum is HR 811, and it is slated to go to the floor in the next few weeks. Introduced by Rep. ...

Paper ballots, optical scanners, effective testing and post-election audits are not the end of the journey to securing our democracy - they are just the next step. And 2008 is not the end of our search for a democracy restored, it's just the next step. I agree with Florida Gov. Crist - no more embarrassments. Our democracy cannot afford the price of another failed election.

HR 811 would require a paper trail
Nieman Watchdog, MA - May 24, 2007 By Lawrence Norden

...Over the past few years, several independent studies have revealed serious security vulnerabilities in the electronic voting machines used across the United States. Over the same period of time, a number of these machines have broken down and/or lost votes on Election Day.

The good news is that experts who have looked at these machines believe that there are some simple steps that can make them significantly more secure and reliable. Many of the most important steps recommended by these experts are incorporated in the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act (H.R. 811) sponsored by Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ). In recent days, this bill was voted out of the Committee on House Administration. It currently has 216 co-sponsors (it needs only 218 votes to pass the House) and is expected to receive a floor vote shortly. Senator Dianne Feinstein plans to introduce a similar bill in the Senate....

Avi Rubin on Holt bill

Earlier this month, US Congressman Rush Holt (D, NJ) introduced H.R. 811, a bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified paper ballot. I have read the bill, as well as some of the criticism by various activists.

In my opinion, passage of the Holt bill would be the single most positive development in this country this decade to ensure the security, integrity and verifiability of elections. As a federal law, this legislation would establish a baseline for all states that would exceed the security and audit of elections in most states today. The bill is well thought out. It addresses the issues of audit, security, privacy, recounts, conflicts of interest, testing, certification, and cost....

Without HR 811, How Many States Will Have Verified Voting for the 2008 Election?

The legislative page at Verified Voting shows that about half of the

country has no verified voting requirement in place.

State-level VVPR Requirements

*VVPR Map Legend*
	Legislation / Regulation Requiring Paper Ballots (27)
	Mixed Requirement (1)
	Proposed, Not Yet Enacted (12+DC)
	Not Yet Proposed (10)

22 STATES HAVE NO LAW IN PLACE:

12 states are trying to get verified voting laws passed,
10 states have no legislation proposed at all,

28 STATES HAVE LAW OR EXECUTIVE ORDER:

3 states have paper ballot requirements by executive order,
25 states have paper ballot/record requirements by law