Pulling Your Lege

Following the decisions of the enormous PTS meetup this week (kudos to Spacedark for organizing), I'm pleased to initiate a weekly column regarding the Texas legislature. I'm not sure this will continue to be weekly when the Lege is out of session, but we'll see. This isn't intended to be a comprehensive summary each week, but rather a special take on one or a few related issues of relevance to the Panhandle (or whatever has my hair on fire). This will appear on Mondays.

Molly Ivins has often said (and I believe this is originally a Ronny Dugger quote) "No man's life, liberty or property is safe while the Texas legislature is in session." Every two years, the fine ladies and gentlemen we send to Austin gather and attempt to outdo the previous session in proving Molly right. The current gathering of the tribes is certainly no exception. The attempts of the former bomb throwers among the Regressive Republicans to provide some facsimile of governance has them twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels trying to be antigovernment when they are the government. As an aside, for those who don't know, I'm on a one-person crusade to reframe the R's (a la George Lakoff) by calling them regressive, a much more accurate and conveniently less popular term than 'conservative', and urging you to do likewise.

The list of possible topics for this column is truly overwhelming. Should we discuss HB 2, the school finance bill that just passed the House? Well, yes, but I'll do that another day. How about HB 3, the tax deform bill that is particularly laughable coming from the party that never met a tax cut it didn't like? Very tempting, but again, I'm going to have to come back to that. Charles Kiker has given us a great summary of some of the criminal justice legislation and I hope he will update us as needed on the progress of those bills. What I want to do in this space today is to focus on several bills that relate to election reform.

A lot of folks have worked really hard over the past 4 years on the national level, since the dread Florida fiasco, to improve our elections systems and restore the faith of our citizenry in their accuracy and integrity. If you don't know a lot of what's gone on, I refer you to verifiedvoting.org and blackboxvoting.org, two really great sources for information and action opportunities. Although BushCorp fought it all the way, Congress did finally pass something called HAVA (Help America Vote Act) in 2002. In addition to providing money for states to "upgrade" their election equipment, HAVA requires that voters be able to verify their ballots before they are cast and counted, that all voting machines provide a "permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity" and that the voter must be given the "opportunity to change the ballot or correct any error before the permanent paper is produced." Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who contributed the audit requirements now incorporated into HAVA, explains that the intent of the provision was to provide a voter-verifiable paper trail. However, many proponents of touch screen voting systems are claiming that the HAVA requirement does not mean the system must allow the voter to verify the paper record. This led us to a situation in 2004 where many citizens cast their ballots on touch-screen machines bought with HAVA funds, but that produced no paper record for the voter to see. Numerous instances of machine malfunctions were reported, almost all of which benefitted one George W. Bush. Hmmmm.

So what can be done to see to it we are not slipping into a permanent state of banana republicanism, to coin a phrase? The effort is ongoing at the national level, where several members of Congress, including Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), along with Sens. Boxer (D-CA) and Clinton (D-NY) are leading the charge. A somewhat more modest, but still useful bill is backed by Sen. Ensign. All of these propose to amend HAVA to make its original intent crystal clear, and all require, among other things, that all voting machines have a paper readout that constitutes the official ballot. At the same time, state legislatures, including Texas, are still struggling with implementing the original HAVA legislation, in order to access the HAVA money.

Most Texas Panhandle counties utilize optical scan technology, which generally meets most of the requirements already, so why should we worry? Three reasons. First, if Texas gains access to the HAVA funds, counties could opt to "upgrade" to touchscreen machines, and then we'd have the same problems as many other jurisdictions. But, second, even if our machines never change, we still have to live in the same state with a lot of voters using touchscreen machines, and it's in our interest to see that those votes are properly recorded as well. And, third, even if the election recording devices (the optical scan machines) are ok, there is ample opportunity for hackery (all senses of the word apply) of the county central tabulating computers that compile all the results from each precinct, so there needs to be additional controls on those machines, including making the source code (programming) public, so that any changes could be detected.

So, what's the Lege up to? At this writing, four bills have been introduced regarding election machines, HB 166 (Pena and Hochberg), HB 1289 (Leibowitz), HB 2259 (Baxter) and SB 94 (Shapleigh). All of them require what is advertised as a "voter-verifiable paper trail". HB 166 and SB 94 are companion bills with identical wording. The key is that none of the bills makes the paper record the official ballot. This is important for purposes of a recount, since any "recount" using an electronic device without a paper record is a sham. HB 1289 and HB 2259 both solve that problem, making the paper record superior for recount purposes. But none of the bills solves the biggest problems, in that any errors, whether malicious or not, cannot be discovered unless an election is close enough to demand a recount, and none of the bills deals with the issues surrounding private companies owning the source codes either for the recording machines or the central tabulating computers. The kicker: all of the authors except Baxter are Democrats. The good news is that we can influence them. Write to Reps. Pena, Hochberg and Leibowitz and Sen. Shapleigh and tell them to alter their bills to conform to the principles of verifiedvoting.org, and preferably to conform to Rep. Holt's legislation. Without that we can get fancy new machines that Bolivia would be real proud of.

The Lege is also up to mischief regarding voting requirements. Following the lead of national Regressive Republicans, they have introduced bills to require additional forms of identification, even for voters who have their registration certificates with them (HB 516, Brown; HB 1293, Nixon; HB 1293, Kolkhorst; HB 1706, Denny; HB 2309, Denny). Essentially, all of these are Jim Crow light and should be fought tooth and nail.

At the same time, there are some bills we can support. HB 899 (Alonzo) would allow voters who are unable to find their correct voting location to vote at a central location (believe it or not, this was one of the problems in Ohio, where the Secretary of State ruled, after the fact, that votes not cast at the correct location were not to be counted; that after numerous incidents of voters being misled or not helped by county election officials). HB 963 (Gattis) would allow a voter to vote on election day even though they had requested an absentee ballot by signing a statement that the mail-in ballot was not received. HB 1382 (Jones) would require counties to inform any citizen when they were removed from the voter rolls for any reason. HB 2073 (Alonzo) would allow same day registration and voting(!). HB 1555 (Alonzo) includes a variety of protections for minority voters.

So, maybe Molly Ivins had it right. The Lege is not a place for the faint of heart. But the point of this exercise isn't to whine and encourage y'all to cry in your beer. The folks we elect, even the ones with the R's behind their names, do respond when they hear from constituents. Sometimes, it even counts when they vote on legislation. Click here for a directory of state legislators and their addresses and phone numbers and use it.

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."--Theodore Roosevelt

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