Thank you, Thom Hartmann!
"Handing our vote over to a private corporation, which counts the votes in secret, is the ultimate crime against democracy." --Thom Hartmann
You want to know what's wrong? THIS is what's wrong! We have people wielding power who have no right to do so, who were NOT elected, and we furthermore have people wielding power who may have been elected but
can't prove that they were elected, and/or who have been elected by bigger majorities than we know and had their mandate for progressive change and reform
shaved by these machines.
We DON'T KNOW what these machines are doing--though we can guess in some instances: where outcomes are just too strange; where pre-election polls get mysteriously reversed on election day; where the pre-2004 honest exit polls (they aren't honest any more) showed clear discrepancies between the 'TRADE SECRET' vote 'count' and how surveyed people SAID they voted; where allegedly elected officials start enacting extreme rightwing policies at odds with public opinion polls, and so on.
We only have to look at this absurd Congress to guess who was really elected and who wasn't. But we shouldn't have to GUESS. We should be able to go back to the BALLOTS and count them IN THE PUBLIC VENUE. We can't do that in half the states in this country, because NO AUDIT IS POSSIBLE of the machines they are using (no ballot, no paper trail), and, in the other half, they are auditing a miserably inadequate 1% of the vote.*
Which brings me to two points that Hartmann made that I would have stated in stronger terms:
Though he says that we need to return to paper ballots counted in public, some of what he said elsewhere in the vid could be construed to imply that if we have a paper ballot, we get an audit. THIS IS NOT TRUE in the electronic systems WITH BALLOTS. In those cases--about half the states--the audit (comparison of ballots to electronic totals) is only 1%--a level of audit that CANNOT detect fraud in electronic voting machines.*
So, basically, the entire system is easily--EASILY!--riggable by those who own the 'TRADE SECRET' code.
Secondly, Hartman says that we have private corporations with "Republican connections" 'counting' all our votes. It is worse than this. We have one private corporation with something like a 75& monopoly over our voting systems nationwide--ES&S, which bought out Diebold. ES&S is a corporation with far rightwing connections that would make your hair stand on end. Its initial funder and major investor was Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the far rightwing/nutball 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals!
It is also disturbing that our current Sec of Defense, Chuck Hagel, was one of the founders of ES&S, which 'counted' his first senate s/election (with no paper trail, of course). Who s/elected this man to become a U.S. senator? Who jumpstarted his career and why?
The question arises, was Obama elected? I believe that he was. But it is only a belief--based on educated guesses about voters' disgust with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, their response to a message of hope and other factors, such as TruthIsAll's study of the polls. We can study various things and make good guesses but we cannot prove it either way. The proof--the ballots--are non-existent or gathering dust, unread by anybody. Obama cannot prove that he was elected. NONE of our government officials can prove that they were really elected!
I've been yelling about this at DU for years and years! This is where I came, in 2004, when that election was so obviously stolen by Bush. (The real exit polls told the true story--Kerry won. Those exit polls were CHANGED. There are screen shots of the change on election night. The exit pollster, Edison-Mitofsky, was COLLUDING with the Bushwhacks!) This was the first major use of the electronic voting systems--which were spread like a plague across the land during the 2002 to 2004 period. The coup was not complete; thus, additional attention was paid to purging black voters from the voting rolls and other crimes, which, combined with fiddled e-voting results, gave us Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for four more years of America-wrecking.
The coup is now COMPLETE. EVERY state now uses these machines, half with NO AUDITS, the other half with inadequate audits.*
ES&S--or whoever is behind ES&S-- can now play our system like a piano, to keep the "military-industrial complex' in clover, to keep the Forever War going, to steadily destroy what few civil rights we have left, to push guns and chaos, to keep us riveted to the TV with the latest random slaughters, to militarize and nazify our society, to make everyone afraid, to destroy civic life--our togetherness, our devotion to the common good--to keep imprisoning the poor, and especially African-Americans--tens of thousands of whom are in prison, for long terms, on non-violent crimes--an increasingly PRIVATIZED prison system, where horrific conditions prevail; to destroy common good programs like Social Security and Medicare, to bust labor unions, to FALSIFY political discussion with phony issues (like the false 'debt crisis'), and to, of course, make the rich richer. The "piano" part is to carefully select venues where 'liberals' are permitted to win, but often these are just "bought and paid for" candidates who basically support this horribly corrupt system. ES&S
also 'counts' the primaries.
Honest, transparent vote counting will not solve every problem, and many problems created by these fascists will persist through the century. But we cannot even START to undo the damage to our country UNLESS we restore honest, transparent vote counting.
And I'm so glad that Thom Hartmann has said this:
"Handing our vote over to a private corporation, which counts the votes in secret, is the ultimate crime against democracy." --Thom Hartmann
It is an ON-GOING crime.
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*(Statisticians whom I respect say that 10% is the MINIMUM audit needed to detect fraud in electronic voting systems. Venezuela, which has an electronic system, does a whopping 55% automatic audit on election day. Their programming code is also public property--not a "trade secret." Jimmy Carter has called this "the best election system in the world." Though I agree that Venezuela has nearly a fraud-proof system, I do NOT think that we should merely add adequate audits to our system, and use open source code. Too much damage has been done, here, for one thing, to public participation in the election system. Venezuela does not have this problem. Their citizenry is very active during elections and on election day. Our citizenry has been so disempowered that most of our people DON'T EVEN KNOW who is 'counting' their votes, or how. We need to restore more than election integrity. We need to restore
democracy, starting with throwing ES&S and their rotten brethren out of our election system entirely, and getting people back to the precincts for vote counting that everybody CAN SEE.)
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