Many Democrats on Capitol Hill (and in the White House) have failed and continue to fail to stand for the traditional principles and values of their party.

Just as the current busy getting dizzy effort at health care reform is an useless exercise in polishing a turd, so too is the latest effort to "correct" the disaster that is computer voting, specifically by touch screen machines, that are insecure, proprietary, and unverifiable, and plagued by errors that cost votes, the "cure" has added to this undemocratic process controlled by private corporations.

It's bad enough that in the 2000 debacle when the Supreme Court crowned King George, that they pronounced that the Constitution does not guarantee a citizen the right to vote, but to have votes stolen by a mostly Republican owned computer voting machines and software companies is adding insult to injury and making a mockery of voting. 

To then create a bill of only partial reforms and dangerous errors boggles the mind, but lends even more credence to the fact that Democrats tend to lose their logic and principles once they become a Congress critter.

An interview at OpEd News spells out why Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) bill is terribly flawed, a definition of the problem, includes a history of Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and the voting catastrophe that HAVA and computerized voting created.

"I told you that Holt's bill [HR 2894] is an expansion of the Help America Vote Act, which was a computerized voting bill.

"So here are four areas where we differ on how to achieve meaningful election reform.

"1. Holt calls for requiring paper records in voting systems, so the paperless touch screen voting machines HAVA paid for will need to be reconfigured to support printers and then to be phased out after the next presidential election and replaced with computerized optical scanning machines instead.

"We call for the abolition of all election systems that use a concealed vote count, invisible to the human eye, and remove any aspect of the voting system (with the exception of the secret ballot) from public oversight. This includes computerized voting with or without paper records.

"2. Holt calls for indefinite funding of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the White House agency created by HAVA to oversee the nation's elections, for expanding their powers to design the specifications by which computerized voting systems can be certified, and for making them the arbiter of state election result certifications.

"We call for the abolition of the EAC. White House oversight, control and design of election system standards, specifications, policies and processes unconstitutionally transfer power from the people to the Executive.

"3. Holt calls for legalizing trade secrecy and proprietary vote counting by computerized voting equipment manufactured and sold by the e-voting industry for use in our elections.

"We call for the abolition of the privatization and outsourcing of constitutional duties like the administration of free, open, and publicly observable elections.

"4. Holt calls for replacing election night vote counts with post-election spot checks of vote tallies as the vote of record.

"We call for publicly observable election night vote counts as the vote count of record."

Brad Blog a veteran in the battle to ban DRE's (touch screen machines) and correct other damaging aspects of computerized voting writes:

"The BRAD BLOG's latest analysis of the currently introduced Holt bill --- noting both its much needed reforms, as well as its serious dangers --- is posted here, for those who would prefer an accurate and unbiased look at the bill before deciding whether it's worth supporting, opposing, or working to see it improved before passage.

"DISCLOSURE: In 2007 we were asked by Holt's office to review, and help draft, several versions of the bill before its introduction. Despite having had a hand in improving several provisions of that version of the bill, we did not ultimately endorse it due to numerous concerns, most notably its failure to ban DREs all together (thankfully, the new version does that, if only by 2014, and even then it allows for the type of unverifiable computer-marked paper ballots which misprinted 4 out of 12 of our own votes during a primary election in California last year), and the language which was severely rewritten in committee to federally institutionalize secret voting and tabulation software for use in public elections. Unfortunately, that latter concern still remains in the currently introduced 2009 version of the bill.