After a brief description of each bill, I'll tell you how you can
write your congresspeople about the bills.
- HR
2239 -- amendment to the Help America Vote Act of 2002 ("Voter
Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003")
This bill will require a paper trail be created for electronic
voting machines and require voting system software to be available for
inspection upon request to any citizen. If you vote without a
voter-verifiable paper trail you have no idea who you voted for because
your votes are being counted by an organization that could give your
vote to some other candidate. You want to be sure the only trusted
record of who you really voted for is stored in a way that cannot
easily be changed.
The software part of this bill is somewhat unenforceable--the bill
lets the public inspect the voting machine software. If the program
we'll vote with passes the inspection of someone you trust, how would
you ever know that *that* software is running on the machine you vote
with? Also, even if you could verify this somehow, you wouldn't have
any way to get the complete source code of all the other programs
running on that machine at the same time, programs that may interfere
with your vote being stored, transmitted, or counted accurately (many
voting machines made by the Diebold corporation run on Microsoft
Windows, for example). This is why the paper audit trail and
preservation of something voter-verifiable is so important.
- HR
2601 -- The Public Domain Enhancement Act ("Eldred Act")
This bill will set up a copyright registry and establish a small
fee for maintaining a copyright beyond 50 years ($1 buys 10 more years
of copyright power; the first payment is due after 50 years from first
publication date; $1 more is due every 10 years thereafter). The grace
period for payment is 6 months.
Currently personal copyright lasts 70 years after death and
corporate copyright lasts a flat 90 years. Most copyrighted works are
not made for commercial gain and of those that are, most are not
commercially viable after 50 years. The goal of the bill is to increase
the number of works in the public domain where everyone can share them
and build upon them. The registry will be publicly accessible and it
will list who has extended the copyright of their work beyond 50 years
(who has paid the fee).
- HR
676 -- United States National Health Insurance Act ("Medicare for
All")
This bill will extend Medicare in scope and coverage and exclude
private health care suppliers from competing with this plan. Anyone
residing in the US (including US territories) is covered under USNHI.
You'll fill out a short form and then you'll get a card to show to
participating clinicians who deliver the care. The text of the bill
lays out what is covered (see section 102 "Benefits and Portability").
This is the bill that Rep.
Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is supporting
as his health care plan. This is expected to be the bill backed by the
Physicians for a National Health Program (see http://www.pnhp.org/ � there is
currently a link to the bill and summary information about the bill on
their homepage).
What can you do to help make these bills law?
- Read the bills. They're not very long (HR676 is the longest of
them and it's only around 20 pages).
- You can ask your representative (in the Senate or House) to co-sponsor or vote for
these bills.
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