Whatever happened to...

... the Count Every Vote Act of 2005? (You can read the full text of the bill here.) This bill came out early this year, sponsored by Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer. Everyone was justifiably alarmed at the egregious voting "irregularities" (to put it mildly) which we saw in the presidential election, particularly in Florida and Ohio. At that time, I observed that such a bill was almost a guaranteed winner. Even if the Republicans secretly didn't want such voting reform because they'd been up to various highjinks, they wouldn't dare to stand up in the public eye and oppose reform that would assure the proper counting of all votes with a paper trail for accountability purposes.

So what happened to the bill? As recently as Aug. 3, as seen in this message from John Kerry's web site on the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the bill was still alive and presumably being worked on. Why hasn't this come to the floor for a vote yet? Why haven't we seen more in the news about it? Just last week, Fox "News" (of all places) ran a story which mentions the bill again, but provides no update on its current status. It also tells about HAVA, the "Help America Vote Act" which was passed in 2002, but has apparently been badly underfunded and is not being put into effect in many states. (Here is a Google news search on HAVA. You'll note that most of the stories seem to focus on problems that the states are encountering in trying to implement the required reforms.)

It's time to contact our senators and contact our congressmen, people, and ask them when they plan to get off the stick and get this bill passed. There's only a little more than a year left before the midterm elections, and 24 more months after that before the next presidential run. It's going to take time to get the mechanics of this bill in place across the nation, so waiting around for it to be passed into law is not an option. Do you really want another November to pass by and watch even more neoconservative candidates "mysteriously" walk off with seats in congress even though public opinion surveys, exit polls and common sense indicated that they didn't stand a chance in hell of winning?