I'm a regular listener to My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, a history podcast put out by Bruce Carlson. Carlson is not a historian, he's a serious observer with good insight. He has a recent podcast on the election called Historic. The first half talks about what happened after the Civil War. If this country had stayed on the path to democracy instead of betraying Reconstruction, who knows where we would be today. Below is the description of Carlson's podcast. I recommend it highly.

Historic

This election is clearly historic. In this podcast we talk of course about the most obvious way: the first African American President. And how that achievement might have happened a long time ago but not for a turning point in history. But we also talk about the myriad ways this election is historic: the major event of a serious female contender for President, the 2nd female VP candidate and first Republican, an election during a war, an election during a recession, an election with no incumbent or veep, a high turnout election, a non 'anti-Washington' election, an election with incumbent party candidates who (once again in history) tried without success to run against the President, an election where money was king but not fatcat money as much as little money, an election where the polls were right, an election where a losing VP candidate (edwards) and a NYC mayor didn't win..but a man unknown to most four years ago, became President - elect, something it appears Americans may like to do. So many ways 2008 is historic, and a great data point for future elections to be judged by. For historical political observers, it's like a nice piece of steak to dive into.

Dear Mr. Nader:

For the last 8 years you’ve pretty much shown you don’t care at all about social movements or justice. When you ran in 2000 I thought there might have been some possibility of you helping galvanize something at the grassroots. Your behavior then and after showed I was wrong.

I don’t mean you being a “spoiler” because that’s a straw man. You didn’t spoil the 200 election. Republicans stole and Gore gave it away. What I do mean is that you had a chance to build something and you passed. Have you yet shared your lists with the Green Party? Did you provide any help or substance in following up with the millions who did vote?

By itself these questions aren’t enough to lead to a letter like this. It is enough for me to not consider voting for you, or the Greens, again. It’s also enough for me to avoid watching you on TV, when I do get the chance to watch. By purposefully avoiding your image on the tube, and also by not turning it on much, I missed the interview you had on Fox “news” on election day. Remember that? You were asked about a comment you made to Fox “News” Radio. In that comment you said

“To put it very simply, he is our first African American president; or he will be. And we wish him well. But his choice, basically, is whether he’s going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.”

You had every chance to backtrack on that quote. You were specifically asked by Shepard Smith- who came across to me like an arrogant, self-righteous ass- asked, “If that’s what you want your legacy to be?” You wiggled around a bit, but you never admitted that phrase was offensive. Or that it could even be possibly considered. Smith actually gave you an out. Remember this:

SHEPARD SMITH: I just wondered if, in hindsight, you wished you used a phrase other than ‘Uncle Tom’?

RALPH NADER: Not at all

Frankly, when you said that you came across as an arrogant, self-righteous ass. Also, you’re a white supremist dickhead. I think you know exactly what you said, you meant exactly what you said, and you said exactly what you wanted to say. Now I’m going to take a turn. Can you just be quiet?

It does feel pretty good.

Seriously, though, shut up.

This is a good article on the status of Republican attacks on ACORN. The piece is copied from the Mother Jones blog. There's also an Associated Press article about the ACORN's press conference. I'm still not a fan of the organization, but I can't take issue with registering hundreds of thousands of people. Personally, I don't see a pattern of voter fraud by ACORN. The idea doesn't even make sense to me. I have deep criticisms of the organization, but they are based on actually talking with people. Having an organization-wide system of making up voter information runs counter to what they do. The problems, in my opinion, most likely stem from having an underpaid and overworked staff pushed to meet ever-increasing goals. They don't have a pattern of voter fraud, they have a pattern of staff abuse.

The ACORN Controversy: A Tough Nut to Crack

For years, conservatives have grumbled about voter registration efforts aimed at low-income citizens, particularly those mounted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), claiming these campaigns are rampant with fraud and corruption that benefits Democrats. On Tuesday, this low-grade battle became a headline-making clash, as the McCain-Palin campaign blasted ACORN and the Obama-Biden campaign and ACORN responded in kind.

At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, the McCain campaign put the chairmen of its "Honest and Open Election Committee," former Republican Senators John Danforth and Warren Rudman, front and center before the national media. The pair asserted that the election is in danger of being compromised, accusing ACORN of submitting thousands of phony voter registrations nationwide. They noted that they had sent a letter to the Obama campaign, Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, and top state election officials proposing the creation of joint election observation teams. "Each campaign would list every precinct where either fears there is a potential for voter intimidation, fraud, or mistrust of the tabulation process on Election Day," the letter reads. "Each campaign would be responsible for recruiting a volunteer for each named precinct. The Republican and Democratic volunteers would work jointly as an observation team." (It is already routine for campaigns and parties to send election observers, often trained lawyers, to polling locations on Election Day. Representatives of local media outlets are commonly on hand as well.)

Danforth and Rudman's letter ends, "Let's talk." The Obama campaign isn't interested. It points out that the campaigns already dealt with this issue in an exchange of letters in September that generated little media attention. At that time, the McCain folks notified the Obama campaign of its joint observation teams idea and a week later the Obama campaign responded harshly: "This seems a starkly political maneuver to deflect attention from the reality of the suppression strategies pursued by national, state and Republican party committees." Nothing further occurred.

- Jonathan Stein on 10/14/08

For a while now Adolph Reed, Jr. has been sounding a cautionary note on Obama's candidacy. This essay, from Black Agenda Report, is not just good analysis of the campaign, but also gives a hint of what we can expect from an Obama presidency. The end of white supremacy in the US? Hardly. More like the end of being able to talk about it being a structural bullwark of capitalism.

BTW, I encourage everyone to check out Black Agenda Report. However, when I tried to read this on their site the layout made it impossible. It seems to be only a error on the one page though.


Where Obamaism Seems to be Going

by Adolph Reed, Jr.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
http://www.blackagendareport.com

A friend called me a few days ago from Massachusetts, astounded at a WBUR radio program featuring Glen Greenwald from Salon.com and Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, in which vanden Heuvel not only unflaggingly defended Obama's open and bald embrace of right-wing positions during the last few weeks against Greenwald's criticism, but also did it from the right herself, calling him a "progressive pragmatist." She affirmed Tom Hayden's insistence on the Progressives for Obama blog that the candidate is a progressive, but a new kind of progressive, or some such twaddle. In response to Greenwald's sharp rebuke of Obama's FISA sellout, she acknowledged that he had "missed an opportunity to lead." Defending his June 30 patriotism speech that included a gratuitous rehearsal of the right-wing line about anti-Vietnam War protesters from the "counterculture" who "blamed America for all that was wrong in the world" and the canard about antiwar activists "failing to honor" returning Vietnam veterans, which Obama asserted "remains a national shame to this day" despite the fact that is an utter lie, vanden Heuvel pointed again to Hayden's endorsement as a sign that Obama's cheap move must be okay because, after all, Hayden was a founder of SDS.

And perhaps most tellingly, despite their disagreements, Greenwald and vanden Heuvel both supported Obama's practice of going out of his way to attack black poor people, most recently in his scurrilous Father's Day speech and again before the NAACP. (And, by the way, he grew up without a father and is running for president, no?) To Greenwald, this is the "Obama we want to see more of," the one who takes positions that are "unorthodox" and "not politically safe." Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public? Who the fuck has been doing anything else for at least twenty years? Public sacrifice of black poor people has been pro forma Democratic presidential strategy since Clinton ran on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and made a burnt offering of Rickey Ray Rector, and victim-blaming based on just-so stories about supposed "behavioral pathology" has been the only frame for public discussion of poverty for at least as long. To vanden Heuvel, Obama's contretemps with Jesse Jackson, who, ironically, has his own history of making such attacks, around this issue reflects a "generational division" among black people, with Obama representing a younger generation that values "personal responsibility." She also, for good measure, asserted that Obama has been "nailed unfairly"for his cozying up to the evangelicals and promising to give them more federal social service money. In explaining that he comes out of a "community organizing" tradition based in churches in Chicago, she didn't quite say that the coloreds love their churches.

But she didn't really have to say it out loud, did she?


This is what passes for a left now in this country. It is a left that can insist, apparently, that Obama's FISA vote, going out of his way (after all, he could simply have followed the model of Eisenhower on the Brown decision and said that the Court has ruled; therefore it's the law, and his job as president would be to enforce the law) to align himself - twice, or three times -- with the Scalia/Thomas/Roberts/Alito wing of the Supreme Court, his declaring that social problems, unlike foreign policy adventurism, are "too big for government" and pledging to turn over more of HHS and HUD's budgets to the Holy Rollers are both tactically necessary and consistent with his convictions. So, if those are his convictions, or for that matter what he feels he must do opportunistically to get elected, why the fuck should we vote for him?

I'd been thinking about doing a "See, I told you so" column about Obama; then, especially given the torrent of vituperation and self-righteous contumely I got after arguing that he's not what far too many nominal leftists were trying to make him out to be, I was tempted instead to do a "To hell with you, you deserve what you get" column. But the smug yuppies to whom I'd address that message -- the fan club we encounter in foundation offices, faculty meetings, soccer games and dinner parties and on MSNBC and in the Nation -- are neither the only people who've listened to Obama's siren song nor the ones who'll pay the price for their self-indulgent idiocy. (And Liza Featherstone deserves acknowledgement for having predicted early that the modal lament of the disillusioned would compare him unfavorably to Feingold.) Among other things, as I saw ever more clearly while watching Rachel Maddow talk with another of that Dem ilk about Obama and his family-- how adorable and "well-raised" or some such his kids are, etc, etc -- a few nights ago on Keith Olberman's show, an Obama presidency (maybe even just his
candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy, and, since even "left" discourse in this country seems capable of conceptualizing the latter as a politically significant matter only in terms of the former (or its gender or similar categorical equivalent), that could just about complete purging entirely out of legitimate political discourse the notion that economic inequality is rooted fundamentally in capitalism's political and economic dynamics.

Underclass ideology -- where left and right come together to embed a common sense around victim-blaming and punitive moralism, racialized of course but at a respectable remove from the familiar phenotypically based racial taxonomy -- will most likely be the vehicle for effecting the purge. Obama's success will embody how far we have come in realizing racial democracy, and the inequality that remains is most immediately a function of cultural -- i.e., attitudinal, and behavioral -- and moral deficits that undercut acquisition of "human (and/or "social," these interchangeable mystifications shift according to rhetorical need) capital," a message his incessant castigation of black behavior legitimizes. In this context, the "activism" appropriate for attacking inequality: 1) rationalizes privatization and demonization of the public sector through accepting the premise that government is inefficient and stifles "creativity;" 2) values individual voluntarism and "entrepreneurship" over collective action (e.g., four of the five winners of the Nation's "Brave Young Activist" award started their own designer NGOs and/or websites; the fifth carries a bullhorn around and organizes solidarity demos); 3) provides enrichment experiences, useful extracurrics, and/or career paths for precocious Swarthmore and Brown students and grads (the Wendy Kopp/Samantha Power model trajectory), and
4) reduces the scope of direct action politics to the "all tactics, no strategy," fundamentally Alinskyite, ACORN-style politics that Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone have described as "activistism" and whose potential for reactionary opportunism Andy Stern of SEIU has amply demonstrated. Obama goes a step further in deviating from Alinskyism to the right, by rejecting its "confrontationalism," which severs its rhetoric of "empowerment" from political action and contestation entirely and merges the notion into the pop- psychological, big box Protestant, Oprah Winfrey, Reaganite discourse of self-improvement/personal responsibility.


All of the above salves the consciences of our professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who want to think of themselves as more tolerant and enlightened than their Republican relatives and neighbors, even as they insulate themselves and their families as much as possible from undesired contact with the dangerous classes and define the latter in quotidian practice through precisely the same racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the conservatives to whom they imagine themselves superior.

This hypocrisy, of course, is understood within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable necessity. Yet those lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as impractical any politics that would challenge the conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying those putative realities. Obama, in the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum.

He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all stripes rush to call a "movement," the reactionary quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes difference for inequality as the crucial metric of political criticism. It's apt in this connection that even elites in the Mississippi Delta, down to the level of the Cotton Museum in Lake Providence, LA, and the blues museums that dot every hamlet on US 61 in Mississippi between Greenville and Memphis, have come to appreciate the political and commercial benefits of multicultural celebration and even civil rights heritage tourism, without destabilizing the underlying relations of racialized subordination.

Indeed, Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class (including, perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements of which now increasingly set the policy agendas for what remains of the women's, environmentalist, public interest, civil rights and even labor movements) and the "progressive"
wing of the investor class. (See, for example, Tom Geoghagen, "All the Young Bankers," The American Prospect, June 23, 2008.) From this perspective, it is ironic in the short term -- i.e., considering that he pushed HRC out of the way -- that Obama would be the one to complete Clintonism's redefinition of liberalism as conservatism. So there's no way I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation, and I'm ready to tell all those liberals who will hector me about the importance of voting that it's the weakest, most passive and least consequential form of political participation, and I'm no longer going to pretend it's any more than that, or that the differences between the Dem and GOP candidates are greater than they are, just to help them feel good about not doing anything more demanding and perhaps more consequential.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's wrong to vote for Obama, though I do say it's wrong-headed to vote for him with any lofty expectations. I would also suggest that it's not an open and shut case that - all things considered - he's that much better than McCain.

In some ways Obama would be better for us in the short run, just as Clinton was better than the elder Bush. In some ways his presidency could be much worse in the longer term, again like Clinton. For one thing, the recent outpouring of enthusiastic support from all quarters - including on black academic and professional list serves and blogs and on op-ed pages - for his attacks on black poor people underscores the likelihood that Obama will be even more successful than Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and frankly racist social policies as humane anti-poverty initiatives. In a way, I suppose, there could be something useful about having a large strain of the black petite bourgeoisie come out as a militant racial class for itself. Maybe that could be a prelude to a good fight, but unfortunately there's no counterweight. And the black professional-managerial strata, despite their ever more blatant expressions of contempt for black poor people, continue to insist on speaking for the race as a whole.

For the rest of the article go the Black Agenda Report.

This is from today's AJC. Could be interesting for the presidential race, but it doesn't shed any light on anything beyond that.


300,000 more Georgians sign up to vote

By RHONDA COOK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 07/01/08
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2008/07/01/voters_register.html

The number of Georgia voters has increased by 300,000 since the first of the year, with more than 4.7 million people on the active rolls for the July 15 primary, according to data released Tuesday.

Local registration officials have seen the number of people signing up to vote at a pace that picks up with each passing month.

The bump is significant, said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political scientist. As a comparison, he pointed out that there were 500,000 names added to the active voting rolls in the three years between the presidential election in 2004 and Jan. 1 of this year. "That is more than a 20 percent increase, so more Georgians are getting themselves signed up to vote," Bullock.

In the July 15 primary, Georgia voters will select nominees for a U.S. Senate seat, several U.S. House seats, the state Legislature and various local elections.

Bullock believes, however, that some of the increase before the July voting can be attributed more to enthusiasm for the November presidential election and the presumptive nominees, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"Obama is getting people to show up," Bullock said. "It may be people inspired by him or people who are scared of him. It could be any one of these. It could be both of these."

According to numbers released Tuesday, there were more than 4.7 million names on the state's active voter list as of June 16, the last day to register for this month's primary. That number is almost 39,000 more than it was two weeks earlier and almost 60,000 more than on May 31.

While Georgia was virtually ignored during the 2004 presidential race because the state was solidly Republican, both campaigns say it could be competitive this fall.

Obama is already running television ads, and the campaign said it has about 75 paid staffers and hundreds of volunteers in the state focusing just on voter registration and turnout. They are going door-to-door, often in their own neighborhoods, handing out mail-in voter registration applications. Their focus is on recruiting African-American and young voters.

The McCain campaign said it is working with the Georgia Republican Party to get people registered and voting. "The best way to encourage people to be involved is old-fashioned politics, friend-to-friend ... a common connection and shared values," said Ben Fry, executive director of the state GOP.

The racial makeup of the state's updated voter rolls is somewhat consistent with previous elections, and it also mirrors the state's population. More than 1.3 million African-Americans are on the active voting list; in November 2006 the number was almost 1.2 million. Then African-Americans accounted for 27 percent of the state's active voters, and now they represent 28 percent.

Both parties are predicting voter turnout in November that will top 90 percent in some counties because of enthusiasm for the presidential race.

I was driving home from vacation, listening to Talk of the Nation. I don't usually listen to NPR shows live so it was a treat to hear a talk show while it was actually happening instead of weeks later. The show was about Clinton supporters and what Obama would have to do to get them to support him. Caller after caller kept saying they had supported Clinton, they were lifelong Democrats, but they were going to vote for John McCain. Why? His "experience." Obama just doesn't have the "experience" that McCain has. McCain had this "experience" while they were supporting Clinton though, but they weren't going to vote Republican until after Clinton lost the nomination bid. What could this "experience" be? The experience of being white in the United States, of course. Tim Wise's essay, reprinted below and available at his website or on Counterpunch, explains it nicely.

Your Whiteness is Showing:
An Open Letter to Certain White Women
Who are Threatening to Withhold Support From Barack Obama in November

By Tim Wise

June 5, 2008

This is an open letter to those white women who, despite their proclamations of progressivism, and supposedly because of their commitment to feminism, are threatening to withhold support from Barack Obama in November. You know who you are.

I know that it's probably a bad time for this. Your disappointment at the electoral defeat of Senator Hillary Clinton is fresh, the sting is new, and the anger that animates many of you--who rightly point out that the media was often sexist in its treatment of the Senator--is raw, pure and justified.

That said, and despite the awkward timing, I need to ask you a few questions, and I hope you will take them in the spirit of solidarity with which they are genuinely intended. But before the questions, a statement if you don't mind, or indeed, even if (as I suspect), you will mind it quite a bit.

First, for those of you threatening to actually vote for John McCain and to oppose Senator Obama, or to stay home in November and thereby increase the likelihood of McCain winning and Obama losing (despite the fact that the latter's policy platform is virtually identical to Clinton's while the former's clearly is not), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people. So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

Your threats are not about standing up for women. They are only about standing up for the feelings of white women, and more to the point, the aspirations of one white woman. So don't kid yourself. If you wanted to make a statement about the importance of supporting a woman, you wouldn't need to vote for John McCain, or stay home, thereby producing the same likely result--a defeat for Obama. You could always have said you were going to go out and vote for Cynthia McKinney. After all, she is a woman, running with the Green Party, and she's progressive, and she's a feminist. But that isn't your threat is it? No. You're not threatening to vote for the woman, or even the feminist woman. Rather, you are threatening to vote for the white man, and to reject not only the black man who you feel stole Clinton's birthright, but even the black woman in the race. And I wonder why? Could it be...?

See, I told you your whiteness was showing.

And now for a third question, and this is the biggie, so please take your time with it: How is it that you have managed to hold your nose all these years, just like a lot of us on the left, and vote for Democrats who we knew were horribly inadequate--Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, right on down the uninspiring line--and yet, apparently can't bring yourself to vote for Barack Obama? A man who, for all of his shortcomings (and there are several, as with all candidates put up by either of the two major corporate parties) is surely more progressive than any of those just mentioned. And how are we to understand that refusal--this sudden line in the proverbial sand--other than as a racist slap at a black man? You will vote for white men year after year after year--and are threatening to vote for another one just to make a point--but can't bring yourself to vote for a black man, whose political views come much closer to your own, in all likelihood, than do the views of any of the white men you've supported before. How, other than as an act of racism, or perhaps as evidence of political insanity, is one to interpret such a thing?

See, black folks would have sucked it up, like they've had to do forever, and voted for Clinton had it come down to that. Indeed, they were on board the Hillary train early on, convinced that Obama had no chance to win and hoping for change, any change, from the reactionary agenda that has been so prevalent for so long in this culture. They would have supported the white woman--hell, for many black folks, before Obama showed his mettle they were downright excited to do so--but you won't support the black man. And yet you have the audacity to insist that it is you who are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and the one before whom Party leaders should bow down, and whose feet must be kissed?

Your whiteness is showing.

Look, I couldn't care less about the Party personally. I left the Democrats twenty years ago when they told me that my activism in the Central America solidarity and South African anti-apartheid movements made me a security risk, and that I wouldn't be able to get clearance to be in some parade with Governor Dukakis. Yeah, seriously. But for you to act as though you are the indispensible voters, the most important, the ones whose views should be pandered to, whose every whim should be the basis for Party policy, is not only absurd, it is also racist in that it, a) ignores and treats as irrelevant the much more loyal constituency of black folks, without whom no Democrat would have won anything in the past twenty years (and indeed the racial gap favoring the Democrats among blacks is about six times larger than the gender gap favoring them among white women, relative to white men); and b) demonstrates the mentality of entitlement and superiority that has been long ingrained in us as white folks--so that we believe we have the right to dictate the terms of political engagement, and to determine the outcome, and to get our way, simply because for so long we have done just that.

But that day is done, whether you like it or not, and you are now left with two, and only two choices, so consider them carefully: the first is to stand now in solidarity with your black brothers and sisters and welcome the new day, and help to push it in a truly progressive and feminist and antiracist direction, while the second is to team up with white men to try and block the new day from dawning. Feel free to choose the latter. But if you do, please don't insult your own intelligence, or ours, by insisting that you've done so as a radical political act.

I wrote a research paper on the definition of torture in the US. During my research I found out a lot about McCain's position on torture: he's against it, except when he's not. Check out American Torture for information on the MCA in 2006. For information on other McCain positions check out therealmccain.com. Here's a sample

This story originally comes from politico.com, but I got it off of Portside.


GOP Objects To Bill Allowing Recounts
Ben Adler
Politico
April 25, 2008
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=7D294509-3048-5C12-00015B2FD7DE0D76

Voting rights activists who hoped the federal government would help local governments pay for paper trails and audits for electronic voting machines have gone from elation to frustration as they watched Republicans who supported such a proposal in committee vote against bringing it to the House floor.

The result: The elections in November will likely be marred by the same accusations of fraud and error involving voting machines that arose in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential race.

When New Jersey Democratic Rep. Rush Holt's Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act came up for a vote in the House Administration Committee on April 2, the Republicans on the committee gave it their unanimous support. But two weeks later, those same Republican members voted against moving the bill to the House floor. It would have taken a two-thirds vote to push the bill to the floor; with most House Republicans opposed, the bill didn't make it that far.

Larry Norden, director of the voting technology project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, called the vote "a sad statement on how little Congress has done on the issue of making sure elections are as secure and reliable as possible."

In May 2003, Holt proposed the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. That bill would have mandated a paper trail for voting machines so that voters could verify their vote and a recount could be performed, if necessary. The measure faced conservative objections on states' rights grounds and failed to make much headway.

So Holt introduced his new bill in January. Under the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act, the federal government would help localities switch to paper ballots or attach printers to their electronic voting machines in time for the November elections. To overcome states' rights objections, Holt crafted the bill as an
opt-in: Nobody would be required to switch technologies or conduct audits, but federal funding would be available to offset costs for those who did.

Without a mandate, Holt's bill drew more bipartisan support; Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) was one of the 92 co- sponsors. "We need standards to ensure that things are auditable, verifiable and give the voters confidence, and [Davis] doesn't think that what we have now does that," said Davis spokesman Brian McNicoll.

"The principle reason for the bipartisan consensus is that this was opt-in," Holt told Politico after the bill passed committee. "Everybody, Democrat and Republican, would prefer fewer disputed elections and better ways of resolving disputes. You can't resolve disputes without a paper trail."

But Holt's bill hit a snag on April 15 when the White House put out a statement of opposition on the grounds that it was unnecessary to spend the money appropriated in the bill when funding could come instead from the Help America Vote Act.

Republicans say it was the bill's cost, not the White House's opposition, that caused them to change their votes. "The version that passed committee on April 2 did not authorize a specific dollar amount," said Salley Collins, a spokeswoman for Republicans on the Administration Committee. "We didn't receive the [Congressional Budget Office] score until the 14th of April, one day before it went to the floor. . So we did not know that the proposed legislation would cost $685 million - $50 million more than Holt's first version."

Holt and his staff dismissed that objection. "There's no reason to expect it would actually cost $680 million,"
he said, arguing that the $680 million estimate assumes more local governments will opt in than he believes is likely.

Republicans also cited concerns regarding implementation. Collins said Holt's bill is "overly prescriptive with the hand recounts," and she suggested that it might not be realistic to expect local governments to adopt new technologies in such a short timeframe. "It could wreak havoc on a hotly contested election," she said.

Holt says these issues are red herrings: Because of the opt-in nature of the bill, any state worried that it could not complete the process in time could simply choose not to participate.

While some election reform activists would have preferred a mandatory bill, many saw it as the best they could hope to get in time for the next election. "On Election Day, if machines are breaking down and there are no paper ballots, the failure of this bill will be one place to look for explanations," said Norden.

Holt is predicting exactly that: Ultimately, he said, the bill's failure will mean that "millions of voters will leave the 2008 election questioning the process and whether their vote means anything."

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify references to bills introduced by Rep. Holt.