wikipedia said:The Hughes Amendment
As debate for FOPA was in its final stages in the House before moving on to the Senate, Rep. William J. Hughes (D-N.J.) proposed several amendments including House Amendment 777 to H.R. 4332 that would ban a civilian from ownership or transfer rights of any fully automatic weapon which was not registered as of May 19, 1986. The amendment also held that any such weapon manufactured and registered before the May 19 cutoff date could still be legally owned and transferred by civilians.
In the morning hours of April 10, 1986, the House held recorded votes on three amendments to FOPA in Record Vote No's 73, 74, and 75. The first vote involved the interstate sale of handguns and was Record Vote 73. The second vote was the controversial Hughes Amendment that called for the banning of machine guns. Despite an apparent defeat of the amendment by voice vote, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), at the time presiding over the proceedings, declared the amendment approved despite the recorded vote clearly indicating otherwise. The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were: ayes 124, noes 298, not voting 12. The Hughes Amendment regarding the banning of machine guns was defeated in Record Vote No 74. The bill, H.R. 4332, as a whole passed in Record Vote No: 75. Nevertheless, the Senate, in S.B. 49, adopted H.R. 4332 as an amendment to the final bill, which included the defeated Hughes Amendment. It was subsequently passed and signed on May 19, 1986 by President Reagan to become Public Law No 99-308, the Firearms Owners' Protection Act.
I found this interesting.
I never knew that the Dems actually rigged the vote, and despite getting caught, still kept it in the final bill.
What can we do (beyond the obvious political solution) to prevent something like this from happening again?
Is there any way that the chicanery involved in the way the votes were tallied could be used to challenge the ban?