Emergency paper ballot legislation in the Senate

WooHoo! Good news from Brad Blog! Today Senators Boxer and Dodd introduced emergency paper ballot legislation. They have written and introduced an amendment to the Help America Vote Act, and similar legislation will be filed in the House. Here's the intro:

To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to reimburse jurisdictions for amounts paid or incurred in preparing, producing, and using contingency paper ballots recording electronic voting machines in the November 7, 2006, Federal general election

This way the counties can't say, "we can't afford to have DREs AND paper ballots".

It's a common sense contingency plan for all precincts to have paper ballots available, especially in light of the fact that there have been many documented cases of problems with electronic DREs. No or inadequate paper trails, crashed computers, jammed printers, and computers that don't boot up. Unknown numbers of voters have been told to "come back later" when the computers aren't working....or haven't shown up at the polls until 10-11:00 a.m. after their sleepovers with a pollworker.

If you are a registered voter and you show up on election day you should never be turned away. Never. Ever.

This has to be PUSHED through the process. This is the last week of the legislative session. So the time is NOW to contact your representatives, and tell them you want them to pass the "Confidence in Vote Act of 2006". If it doesn't pass this week, it won't happen before the November election. If they can all fly to DC to pass legislation that affects one person, they can do this. It's do-able. One of the things that makes it politically do-able in a short time is that it's not an mandate.

Now you go read Brad's article and the text of the proposed legislation. It's happy news.

More to come....