AR Rep Carroll Attempts to Take God Out of Politics

Newly elected Arkansas House Representative Richard Carroll has wasted no time digging into the archaine "isms" of Arkansas' state politics. First was the bill to extend the petitioning period for ballot access from a mere 60 to a still challenging 90 days. Then, on February 11, he introduced a bill to remove the language from the state's Constitution which prohibits a declared atheist from holding public office or testifying as a witness.

Article 19 Section 1 : No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State, nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court.

Wednesday was the last day members of the 87th General Assembly could file a bill for purposes of proposing a constitutional amendment. The Bill has been referred to the Committee on STATE AGENCIES & GOVT'L AFFAIRS.

• Carroll's State Legislator Page
• Great background article on Carroll
• Godless Geek's list of State Constitution with restrictive language
• Nice article on Progressive Democrat and Green Party alliance
  

Secret Service and Police Stage Pre-emptive Attacks on Protestors

Polidoc heads into Minneapolis where we will catch up with Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente who attended the Monday protest against the Republican National Convention (RNC). While we haven't had the time to update our blog, we will do a significant wrap-up next week. Until then, here's a press release from the Green Party of United States.

*****

DESPITE POLICE RAIDS AND ARRESTS, MINNESOTA GREENS JOIN ANTIWAR, ANTIPOVERTY PROTESTS AT RNC

Greens have been among those targeted for harassment and intimidation by police in a wave of pre-emptive actions taken before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

On Saturday police surrounded the home of Michael Whelan, a long-time Green Party supporter, whose Arise Bookstore at one time housed the party's office. He was host to a group of independent journalists. The police broke down doors and subjected occupants to house arrest. "You figure this would be going on in South Africa, or Russia, not in St. Paul," Whelan said. "St. Paul is nice."

The previous night, police had invaded a meeting space in St. Paul rented by the anarchist RNC Welcoming Committee. They seized equipment and subjected some fifty people to handcuffing and search. Next day Monica Bicking, a leading member of the organization, was jailed along with three friends, and her home in Minneapolis was boarded up for alleged violation of city codes.

Meanwhile, the group's nonviolence consultant and trainer, Betsy Raasch-Gilman, expecting arrest, took "sanctuary" at the meetinghouse of Twin Cities Friends (Quakers). As of this morning Bicking had been released, but those arrested with her and several others remain in custody. Both Bicking and Raasch-Gilman are daughters of former Green Party candidates and present spokespeople.

According to Minnesota poet and writer Richard Broderick, who is a member of the Green Party and has also been one of its candidates, "The erosion of civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights in this country makes all the eloquent calls we heard from Denver for unity and restoring the American Dream little more than hollow rhetoric."

Despite the efforts at intimidation orchestrated by federal authorities and carried out by DFL administrations in both Hennepin and Ramsey counties, Minnesota Greens have united to bring their VP candidate, Rosa Clemente, to the Twin Cities. She addressed the antiwar marchers in St. Paul today and tonight appeared with the National Truth Commission on Poverty. She will be participating in the Poor People's march from Mears Park tomorrow.

Jesse Johnson Raises Symphony Hall - Puts A Call Out for Freedom

Polidoc will be releasing more videos this week. Until then, enjoy the soulful song candidate Jesse Johnson put out at the 2008 Green Party National Convention on July 12, 2008 at Chicago's Symphony Hall.

Johnson moved into electoral activism after years of absence from his home state. He was appalled at the destruction of his native blue ridge mountains by profit driven coal companies. A former Republican, Johnson represents the Libertarian Greens; in the past, he was endorsed by Mike Gravel.

Johnson continues his electoral activism in West Virginia, where the Green Party's affiliate, The Mountain Party, has nominated him to run for Governor. Johnsn is scheduled to be in two debates in October, when election season really heats up.

Nader Charges Citizens to Tackle Politics Head On, No Seatbelts Required

"How do you satire a satire?" Nader asks in this hour long video address (which starts about half way through the clip), before an applauding crowd at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on April 5. Suffering a little campaign fatigue but showing no intent to let up his opposition to this "Whitehouse marininated in oil" or this Congress, the orator eloquently rises and delivers his impassioned and concerned appeal for greater citizen participation in politics.

"Are we a serious people requiring our members of Congress, 535 members who put their shoes on every monring like we do, to stand tall for the major framework of law and justice in our country, the US Constitution?”

His begins with a call for the impeachment of President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney; Nader has long called for their impeachment. However, he trains his eyes on the Democratic Congress and assails it for abdicating its responsibility to impeach “the most impeachable President.” He remarks, “There’s something deficient in the DNA character of the Democratic Party.”

He then talks about the media, whom he finds to be derelict, more fascinated with interpreting the latest gaff between candidates and manufacturing gossip than in pressing for greater depth.

He also has a word for lawyers, some 800,000 of whom he would like to see out there in droves defending the Constitution, but for one reason or another have excused themselves. “We give lawyers the privilege of monopolizing access to the courts, that privilege comes with a responsibility to defend the public interest, especially in such dire times.”

Finally, Nader calls upon individuals to awaken our civic mindedness and get involved. “Unless we develop the civic personality that gets us really upset to break with our routines, to connect with our neighbors and communities, to do what we didn't think we were capable of doing, to develop our civic talents, we will simply watch this country of ours continue to slide into the abyss under the domination of a two party duopoly that excludes competition and turns our government over to giant corporations. These giant corporations are now THE government.”

He likened the spirit of citizen watchdogs to that of birdwatchers. He hopes that we all turn an eye to our legislators and learn what they are doing and set high expectations on their conduct. If someone in one part of the country sees something, then a whole flock of activists can look at it. And if that bird should land on the Capitol Dome, the watchers will follow.

In conclusion, he quotes the philosopher Cicero, "Freedom is participation in power." As always, go forward.

The Myth of Verified Voting

Guest Article by Nancy Tobi, Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee

How GOP strategists & J. Abramoff transformed America's elections & the reform movement

In 1995, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Republican strategist Grover Norquist launched the "K Street Project." (i) Named for the Capital Hill street housing many lobbying firms, the Project gave lobbyists direct access to Washington lawmakers through weekly policy and strategy meetings. The most infamous K Street lobbyist was Jack Abramoff, who worked for the firm Greenberg Traurig. Abramoff, now in prison, took money from his American Indian tribe clients, and laundered it to Congressional Representatives in return for legislative and policy favors aligned with the Project's political agenda.

But this was not just any money laundering enterprise. Abramoff's dry cleaner was converting money to election fraud.

In 2002, the New Hampshire GOP received three $5,000 checks, just in time to pay $15,600 to a telemarketing company that jammed the phone lines of the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote campaign in the morning hours of the election.
The three $5,000 checks? One each from two separate Abramoff tribal clients and the third from K Street loyalist Tom DeLay's ARMPAC.(ii)
The phone jamming trick, contributing to GOP Senator Sununu's narrow win, shows the magical rabbits that can pop out of a hat when Capital Hill lobbyists focus their attention on elections.

In its heyday, the K Street Project held election "reform" dead center in its crosshairs.
Project activities like New Hampshire's phone jamming, Ohio's "Coingate" and Tom Delay's Texas "PAC-gate", spun lobbyist money into election fraud gold. K Street masterfully laundered funds to influence election campaigns, policies, and processes around the nation. The Project functioned as one big money-laundering-for-election-fraud apparatus. K Street's most influential project was the 2002 sweeping election reform known as the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA), whose architect, former Congressman Bob Ney, is also now in federal prison. (iii) HAVA was brilliantly subversive, spinning money into a sparkling, rich, complex and intricate golden gateway to perpetual election fraud.

HAVA's most benign outcome was to feed billions of dollars to an unsavory e-voting industry, including Greenberg Traurig's client, Diebold Election Systems.(iv) Its most insidious and dangerous outcome was the creation of the myth of verified voting and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a White House agency with unprecedented power over the nation's elections.

Election 2000 – Election Reform 2002

In the aftermath of Election 2000, the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore decision(v) dealt one terrible blow after another to our nation's democracy. The subversion of the democratic process that began with this decision continued with HAVA and its agency of perpetual subversion: the EAC.(vi)

In 2002, the K Street-influenced Congress passed HAVA with great theatrical fanfare. The American people, still reeling from Election 2000, received it with a wholesale willingness to suspend disbelief.

"But when the smoke had cleared, a closer look revealed that HAVA had codified, rather than fixed, Election 2000’s largely unreported but most egregious trespasses of democracy (vii):"

1. Electronic voter registration databases: In Florida 2000, up to 94,000 eligible voters – all identified as "Democratic-leaning"- were unjustifiably purged from electronic voter databases and not allowed to vote.


2. Electronic voting machines: Florida 2000's electronic voting equipment mistabulated countless votes. In Volusia County alone, computers tabulated for Candidate Al Gore negative 16,022 votes.


3. Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: Florida 2000's vote count was stopped by the Supreme Court, effectively deciding the election for us.

HAVA alchemy transformed these three root causes of the Election 2000 catastrophe into the law of the land:

1. Electronic voter registration databases: HAVA required every state in the nation to implement electronic voter registration databases.


2. Electronic voting machines: HAVA mandated accessible voting equipment, specifically recommending and funding computerized touch screen machines.


3. Presidential appointees with powerful authority to influence election outcomes: HAVA created the Election Assistance Commission, four presidential appointees with broad and ever-expanding powers over the nation's election systems.

Post-HAVA elections have delivered one disaster after another - from e-voting crashes, unequal distribution of expensive computerized equipment, registration database complications and abuse (viii), electoral lawsuits, and the multi-billion dollar e-voting industry's coups over the nation's democratic election processes (ix).

Outsourced Elections and Secret Vote Counting

The Election 2000 media message was filled with butterfly ballots, pregnant chads (x), and video clips of Florida election officials staring at computer punch cards struggling to discern the "intent" of the voter.(xi) In 2002, HAVA's message was that paper ballots caused chaos in Florida, but HAVA would take care of that, distributing nearly $3 billion to the states to buy electronic voter registration databases and paperless touch screen voting machines. The number of American votes counted by computers went from 71.5% in 2000, to 84% in 2004, and 86% in 2006.(xii)This was a cataclysmic change for election systems, and six years later, election officials continue to struggle with the transformation of familiar and manageable low-tech elections to the complex high-tech theatre wrought by HAVA.

The destabilizing effect on America's mechanism of democracy has been substantial. Techno-elections have caused shortages of poll workers, who, with an average age of 72 years, are averse to the complexities of e-voting(xiii). America's elections are now plagued by general confusion and the inability of our public officials to independently administer our elections without corporate support services. Corporate employees now appear at our elections to assist poll workers in using their equipment, administer "fixes" for equipment malfunctions, and to hold vote data and election results in their black box secret vaults away from public scrutiny.

Each election cycle county and municipal coffers are emptied to meet the newly enriched and empowered e-voting industry's ever-increasing demands for programming, maintenance, upgrades and training.(xiv)

"What is going on here? A Republican House attorney, involved in the original drafting of HAVA, once remarked to me, “They are trying to complexify our elections to the point where citizens have no idea what is going on.” "

This is more than just a story of greedy corporations.

Swiftboating of Paper Ballots & Launch of Verifiable Voting

The truth behind the corporate media's 2000 "hanging chad" story is that Florida's much maligned "paper ballots" were really just the paper component (the computer punch cards and computer-scannable paper) of a failed computerized voting system, poorly designed and in some cases delivered on intentionally defective paper(xv).

Real paper ballots are pieces of paper with candidate names printed on them in legible human-readable letters, on which voters simply mark an "X" by the name of their candidate of choice. Real paper ballots counted by real human beings have no hanging chads obscuring voter intent.

Unlike real paper ballots, the ballots in Florida 2000, designed for computers to read, were confusing to human voters. Additionally, they were intentionally produced on defective paper to conflict with the computer operations.

But the nation remained distracted by hanging chads, and congressional magicians pulled HAVA's multibillion dollar e-voting coups out of their hats. Voila. America's elections were transformed in the blink of an eye.

From "Right to Vote" to "Opportunity to Verify a Voting Machine"

Technology-based elections are the keystone of HAVA. Through HAVA, K Street money modified elections for technology rather than voter needs. This continues to this day in nearly every proposal for post-HAVA federal election reform.
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the now normative vocabulary of election reform: "verifiable voting."

HAVA states that a voting system must "permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted."(xvi)

HAVA's language is significant. When a voter marks a paper ballot with pen or pencil, he has no need to "verify" his choice. A voter only needs to "verify" his vote when it has been marked and/or counted by a computer.

HAVA intent was to technologize America's elections, even down to the terminology used to define voters' rights, transforming our constitutional right to vote into the opportunity to verify a voting machine's vote, and turning voters and election officials into quality control agents for the e-voting industry. Removing elections from the public domain, verified voting now centralizes power in the hands of technology experts and private corporations using proprietary trade secret software to count our votes.

HAVA initiated an ongoing program of government grants to fund a cottage industry of computer scientists and statisticians devising elaborate protocols to support the "verifiability" and "auditability" of technology-based elections.

HAVA's anti-democratic notion of "verifiable voting" has even diverted many voting rights activists from the fundamental and core principles of democratic elections: publicly owned and operated, fully observable elections with citizen controls over every aspect of the voting system. Many grassroots activists are now fighting for the opportunity to verify and audit voting machines rather than the right for fair and open voting and vote counting.

Despite the inherently false premise of verifiable voting, it has become the clarion call for 21st century election reformers in congress, the EAC, and grassroots movements alike.

Secret Vote Counting: Touch screens & Optical Scanners

After HAVA rolled computerized touch screen machines into roughly 40% of America's polling places, reformers clamored for "voter verified paper audit trails"(VVPAT)(xvii).

This reform would send more money to the e-voting industry to attach printers to their touchscreen voting machines. The printers would then display a receipt-like printout to voters, who could look through a window and "verify" their vote.

But VVPAT, corporate controlled and proprietary, denies citizens the opportunity to oversee how their vote is being recorded and counted. Computer scientists remind us that a computer can easily be programmed to display one thing, record another, and count something altogether different. To make things worse, the display window in many of the VVPAT machines is inadequate for voters to even read the print out. Studies soon showed that between 10-20 percent of VVPAT paper records are unreadable and unusable for the purposes of "verifying" the votes in a recount. Other studies showed that only a very small percent of voters "verify" their vote in this manner.(xviii)

Ultimately, many VVPAT reformers abandoned the cause.

Today many reformers would willingly exchange all touch screen voting machines for optical scanners using voter marked paper ballots. I myself have, in the past, advocated for just such a solution as a great way to reintroduce voter marked paper ballots into every polling jurisdiction in the nation, itself a step in the right direction.

But I had to step away from that position. Because optical scan technology, like the touch screens, keeps the count itself secret and proprietary. Citizens and candidates are denied access to the count, even when the computers perform such bizarre tabulations as were seen in Florida 2000's negative vote count for candidate Gore.

Corporate controlled, trade secret optical scanners, like their touchscreen brothers, turn public votes into privatized election data.

Democratic Elections: Core Principles

Many voting activists continue to fight for optical scanners. But the fight for verifiable voting is, in fact, nothing more than a fight to continue the outsourcing of our elections to private corporations using secret vote counting technologies. To fight for verifiable voting is to perpetuate the subversion of our democratic elections. Secret vote counting is the antithesis of democracy. When you rationalize the use of secret vote counting in America, you ignore the core principles of democratic elections as defined by the Founders. These core principles define democratic elections as those with citizen controls, that are publicly owned and operated, in which the entire voting system (with the exception of the secret ballot) is fully observable. You can not inject privately controlled secret vote counting into this equation. It does not add up.

I recently asked a national organization supporting voting rights through legal action to help eliminate privatized secret vote counting in New Hampshire. My appeal was rejected because New Hampshire uses paper ballots and optical scanners, and they would never take a case that "prosecutes optical scanners" when they were fighting to replace touch screen machines with optical scanners in so many other parts of the nation.

That same organization sent observers to the New Hampshire 2008 Primary recount, and one has to wonder if they still believe quite as strongly in the myth of verified voting after that experience.

In New Hampshire, many officials and politicians point to the state's accessible recounts to justify the use of secret vote counting technology to count 84% of New Hampshire votes on election night. This is just another manifestation of the myth of verified voting. The logic behind this is that it is somehow excusable to allow secret vote counting on election night because, theoretically, you can always count the paper ballots by hand in a recount. But how does this play out in real life?

In the 2008 Primary recount, as the verified voting teams launched their NH recounts, the citizen voting rights activists decided to test the core principles of democratic elections. National activists came to New Hampshire to observe the recount, focusing on the ballot chain of custody, as the paper ballots were transported from New Hampshire cities and towns to the state capital for the recount. After all, they reasoned, what good is "verifying" the vote, if you can't be sure the vote you are verifying is the actual vote that had been cast on election night?

What the citizen observers discovered was that verifiable voting is as mythological as the unicorn. They discovered they could not, in fact, verify that the votes being verified were the votes that had been cast on election night because there was virtually no oversight on the ballot chain of custody. Boxes of ballots had to be delivered from cities and towns to a central location for the recount. But the state did not allow for citizen controls at all in this process. (xviiii)

The state obstructed citizen observation of the ballot deliveries by transporting the ballots in state vehicles at high speeds that eluded their citizen chaperones. The state delivered the ballots under cover of darkness preventing citizen oversight. The state utilized K-9 police units with fiesty barking police dogs to prevent citizens from approaching as ballots were unloaded from state vehicles to the centralized recount location. And the state broke its own law by not providing secure ballot containers to the cities and towns, resulting in ballots being stored and transported in cardboard boxes, often broken open and unsealed, often cluttered with miscellaneous labels and writing, and for which it was impossible to detect whether or not any tampering might have occured.

And who's to say what might have occured with those torn and abused cardboard boxes of ballots in the days and weeks they were left unattended in the locked but unsecured closets of New Hampshire's old town halls?

The verified voting scenario in New Hampshire's 2008 Primary recount is starkly different from a real democratic election, such as those held in 45% of New Hampshire's polling places, where the votes are counted on election night, by hand, with at least one public observer for every one counter, using proper counting methods to reconcile all the numbers (number of voters checked in, number of ballots cast, number of uncast or spoiled ballots, number of blank ballots started with, etc.).

New Hampshire's e-voting proponents are dead wrong when they claim that verified voting rationalizes secret vote counting. The truth is, nothing rationalizes secret vote counting unless you want to have a form of government that is quite other than the democratic republic that is our American birthright.

Which brings us back to the core principles of democratic elections. Both the New Hampshire and the Massachusetts Constitutions, the two earliest constitutions in the nation, drafted by the nation's Founders and predating the United States Constitution, include a requirement to count the votes in open meeting. In open meeting. That means, where everyone can observe the count. Black box vote counting, where anonymous programmers working for private corporate interests, often with partisan ties, using proprietary trade secret technology, does not meet this constitutional requirement.

Verifiable voting is nothing more than a myth perpetuated by the e-voting industry and locked into place by K Street lobbyists. An audit, a recount, a computer receipt.... None of these are adequate substitutes for the right to vote and to have your vote counted publicly and fairly and honestly.

We could not get any farther from the Founders' vision.

Sources:

(i Think Progress, "If You Don't Know About the K Street Project, You Don't Know Jack", January 13, 2006.
(ii Marshall, Joshua, "Three Years Later, GOP Can't Shake Taint of '02 Tactics," The Hill,, October 20, 2005 and Cohen, Adam, "A Small Time Crime with Hints of Big Time Connections Lights up the Internet," New York Times,, April 17, 2006.
(iii) Rolling Stone, "Editorial, A Call for Investigation," June 1, 2006.
(iv) BlackBoxVoting.ORG, "The Road to Boondoggle was Paved with Good Intentions," January 30, 2007.
(v) Cornell University, Supreme Court Collection, George W. Bush, et al., petitioners v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al.
(vi) Tobi, Nancy, "The EAC Certification Ponzi Scheme" , October 3, 2006.
(vii) Tobi, Nancy, "The Gifts of HAVA to American Democracy: Time to Ask for a Refund", October, 2005.
(viii) Wolf, Richard, USA Today, "Legal Voters Thrown off Rolls," January 2, 2008.
(ix) Fitrakis, Bob and Wasserman, Harvey, What Happened in )Ohio, New Press, October, 2006.
(x) Jones, Douglas, "Chad-From Waste Product to Headline", 2002.
(xi Jackson, Brooks, CNN, "Hanging Chads' often viewed by courts as sign of voter intent", , November 16, 2000.
(xii) Brace, Kimball Election Data Services, Overview of Voting Equipment Usage in United States, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) Voting (.pdf format) and 2006 Voting Equipment Study.
(xiii) Drinkard, Jim, USA Today, "Panel Cites Poll Workers' Age as Problem", August 9, 2004.
(xiv) Myerson, Rosemary , "Comparison of Operating Costs", February 8, 2005, and Voting Machines ProCon.org, Voting Machine Issues, Costs, click here
(xv) Breslauer, Alan, BradBlog, "Dan Rather Reports Video: 'The Trouble with Touch Screens' Will be Huge Trouble for Sequoia, ES&S and Maybe the Republicans from the 2000 Election!" , August 15, 2007.
(xvi) Help America Vote Act of 2002 Public Law 107-252, Section 301
(xvii) Hall, Joseph Lorenzo, UC Berkeley School of Information, "Design and the Support of Transparency in VVPAT Systems in the US Voting Systems Market," , 2006.
(xviii) Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, May 2005, and Lehto, Paul, "Ultimate Nightmare for Democracy, High Confidence Yet Total Fraud" , May 21, 2007.
(xviiii) BlackBoxVoting.ORG

Nancy Tobi is co-founder, former Chair, website editor for Democracy for New Hampshire (DFNH), and Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee. Nancy is the author of numerous articles on election integrity, including "The Gifts of HAVA: Time to Ask for a Refund," "What's Wrong with the Holt Bill," "We're Counting the Votes: An Election Preparedness Kit," and "Hands-on Elections: An Information Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People". Her article about election reform fallacies is included in the April 2008 book "Losers Take All" edited by Mark Crispin Miller.

Nancy believes in the principles embodied in our Constitution, and that groups like Election Defense Alliance and DFNH can play a unique role by empowering ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

New Hampshire Recount Election Reality TV

Guest Article by Nancy Tobi,
Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee


New Hampshire Diebold-lovers and voting machine apologists like to point to our paper ballot hand count recounts in order to rationalize outsourcing the counting of 80-90% of our votes to private corporate interests using secret vote-counting technologies. They say we need these secret vote-counting privatized machines on election night to spare our election officials the "burden" of staying late to count the ballots. They say, what's the problem? We can always count the paper ballots by hand in a recount.

Hmmmm...Look at what happens to the paper ballots between Election Night Diebold count and the hand count recount. Watch the video. Do you feel the recount is secure?

Chain of Custody: Butch & Chase 1 of 2

A road trip video made by clean voting activists of New Hampshire

See more BlackBoxVoting Videos

Here is the truth: Publicly observable, hand counts on ELECTION NIGHT are the ONLY secure way to ensure the integrity of election results. There is no Butch and Hoppy show that way. There are no high-speed chases led by Butch and Hoppy with our paper ballots in their van as they try to elude citizen oversight.

Get it right on Election Night. Counting the votes is the "burden" of democracy. If our election officials and state legislators can't handle this "burden" then they ought to step down. NH Legislators, under the advise and guidance of NH Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan, this year alone killed five important bills that would have protected our elections against Diebold-controlled secret vote-counting. See below the list of bills the Election Law Committee killed, at the recommendation of the Chair of that committee.

If NH legislators and election officials at the state and local levels think we can't handle the "burden" of counting our votes, maybe it's time for them to go and make room for others who believe we need to and will do whatever it takes to protect our democracy.
Click to view video below, and scroll down to see full list of election law bills killed in Committee and by the full House in 2007.

Bills Killed by NH Election Law Committee Chair

HB136: would have required the Ballot Law Commission (BLC) to apply a standard for approval of voting technology: "Before approving any voting machine or device, the ballot law commission shall, following a public hearing, find that there is clear and convincing evidence that the voting machine or device being examined has been designed and manufactured with adequate safeguards to insure the integrity of election results."

HB138: would have required full public disclosure of voting technology information (Deputy Secretary of State Scanlan, representing industry interests rather than voter interests, argued "we can't require disclosure because the vendor won't go for it" and "we can't make drastic changes like this too quickly".

HB141: would have allowed voters to choose paper over vapor: "The use of such (voting) machines or devices so authorized shall be valid for all purposes, provided that the city or town adopts a procedure whereby each voter is given the option of bypassing the voting machine or device and having his or her paper ballot counted by an election official." Secretary Gardner in testimony supporting the bill to the legislature argued that allowing people to choose the manner of having their vote counted is an essential element of grassroots democracy, and this would allow election officials to better fulfill the will of the electorate.

HB192 -FN: would have required election night checks and balances on voting machine counts, by requiring a parallel hand count on election night of at least one race for all machine count towns "At each polling place using a voting machine or device to count ballots, the election officials shall count the votes cast for at least one contested office on the ballot. At the discretion of the moderator, election officials may count the votes cast for additional offices." This particular bill is a check and balance the NH Fair Elections Committee had in 2006 requested be included in the SoS Election Procedure Manual, but the office of the Secretary of State refused to do so.

HB574 -FN-L: would have required all machine count jurisdictions to preserve electronic vote data held on the memory cards used in voting machines for the 22 months required by federal law. This would have clarified that e-vote data falls within this requirement for preservation of voting records, which Asst. Attorney General Jim Kennedy has already stated is the case. In other words, many places in NH that allow the vendor to erase vote data from the memory cards are already in violation of federal law but this state law would have made this absolutely clear.

Bill Passed by NH Election Law Committee Chair

HB285: sets up a committee to work on election technology - a committee that has no citizen representation, whose members are all appointed, and which has no mandate to even consider voting rights (citizen oversight, checks and balances) but rather to take as a given that elections should be run by technology.
In short, it doesn't take much in NH to maintain the status quo. Just a few strategically placed individuals in the right offices and positions, and the industry interests are protected.

On the other hand, it is a local decision to use voting machines or to hand count, so all we need to do is convince 300+ local officials that they have betrayed our democracy by choosing Diebold over citizen-controlled elections. Small task.

Nancy Tobi is cofounder, former Chair, website editor for Democracy for New Hampshire (DFNH), and Chair of the NH Fair Elections Committee. Nancy is the author of numerous articles on election integrity, including "The Gifts of HAVA: Time to Ask for a Refund," "What's Wrong with the Holt Bill," "We're Counting the Votes: An Election Preparedness Kit," and "Hands-on Elections: An Information Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People". Her article about election reform fallacies is included in the April 2008 book "Losers Take All" edited by Mark Crispin Miller.

You can find more videos posted by Nancy on her YouTube Channel.

Mike Gravel Supports Jesse Johnson's Campaign

Jesse Johnson, Green Party Presidential Candidate met with Democratic Presidential candidate, Mike Gravel in which they agreed that the two major parties block third party voices at the expense of the people and nation and that must change.

Gravel said, "If we want to end the war in Iraq, provide health care to all citizens, educate our young people, we’re going to have to start not only working together with these alternate parties: but literally working to support them. That's why I'm supporting Jesse Johnson's campaign for President."

That support plays as a bonus boost for Johnson, whose recent attainment of the West Virginia ballot line for the Green Party is earning the relatively new Green Party member some clout in the party. Johnson, who plans to do a whistlestop tour through the United States via train, will be meeting up with Gravel for public presentations from time to time throughout the campaign.

Johnson comes from a long line of police officers and grew up as a Republican, but one whose compassion was apparent through his work as an EMT, youth educator and film maker. However, as he witnessed what the Bush Administration's "Open for Business" policy meant to West Virginia's Governor Joe Manchin, he rushed into environmental activism. Just a couple of miles from his ancestral home and throughout the mountain region, coal companies began to blast off whole mountaintops with high-grade explosives in a high-speed effort to extract as much coal as quickly as possible. In the wake of these continuing explosions, the air and water has been contaminated and the socio-economic conditions have plummeted. These are the same mountains about which John Denver sang, "ripped up by greed," said Johnson. He is also concerned that in the process of mountaintop removal, no attempt is made to capitalize on the potential economic benefit of farming the lumber prior to the blows or trapping the natural gasses from within.

Recently, the Greens have seen a number of former Republicans join their ranks. The Green' strong plank on old-time Republican values such as conservation, fiscal responsibility, decentralization and local control holds interest for those who have lost faith in the Republican Party of today, according to a Green Party Political Director Brent McMillan. "Greens are the most frugal people you'll ever meet," he said. "Once people see them in office, they begin to realize that."

The Green Party has also seen a number of disenchanted Democrats join their party as well, Cynthia McKinney, former Democratic Congresswoman of Georgia, most notably. She is also running for President on the Green Party ticket and has accumulated a lot of support amongst many Greens. Members of the Green Party have tried to recruit her to run for spot for years. She now says, "I’ve come home to the Green Party."

There are also two Grassroots Green candidates, Kent Mesplay of California and Kat Swift of Texas, also running for the seat of Presidential nominee. While neither has previously held office, their party-building work is notable.