Vernon Ehlers: “Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss this bill and, first of all, to commend Mr. Holt for his efforts and his concerns.…”

“Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss this bill and, first of all, to commend Mr. Holt for his efforts and his concerns. He is sincerely and extremely concerned about accuracy in voting, and what can be done to make certain that the results are accurate. He expressed that in his first bill, H.R. 811, which did not receive committee consideration. I spent considerable time with him trying to work out the details of that bill, but we simply could not reach agreement or even come close to agreement. I commend Mr. Holt again for his concern and his persistence, as he authored H.R. 5036. When I reviewed it with him I thought this might be a much better basis for agreement and, that by working together, we might be able to achieve that. Unfortunately, we have not achieved full agreement on it, although we did get it out of committee. I supported it out of committee because I thought it should reach the floor for floor debate. I anticipated that it would be taken up under a rule where we might have the possibility for an additional compromise, but that has not happened. There are a number of issues that still remain. I agree with Mr. Holt that we should have some type of redundancy in our recording systems. I disagree that it has to be paper. I think there are other methods of achieving redundancy.”