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Edited on Fri Jul-20-07 05:48 PM by Peace Patriot
But, no, what Feinstein & the DLC were/are into is salvaging the billion dollar electronic voting boondoggle--and corporate control of election results--for the rightwing Bushite corporations who have been 'counting' virtually all our votes under a veil of corporate secrecy since 2004 (80% Diebold/ES&S vote tabulation--and on a more scattered basis since 2002).
They didn't want the grass roots movement--at the state/local level--to open the "trade secret" code to public scrutiny to result in any dirty little secrets getting out (--like the theft of the 2004 election). So a MUST DO for their phony "reform" bill was to pull the secret code entirely under the purview of a presidentially-appointed "commission." That poison pill is what mostly killed the Holt bill. It was an unconscionable provision, a major violation of our right to transparent elections and our right to insist, at the state/local level, on procurement policies and election laws that WILL PRODUCE transparency--that is, vote counting that everyone can see and understand.
It was NEVER THE INTENTION of the Diebold II Congress to reform this Stalinist election system.
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." --Josef Stalin
That prescription works as well for a fascist/corporatist police state, as it does for a centralized communist police state. Stalin would be quite comfortable with this system--as long as he was the dictator. Shades of Bush.
And we are paying for it now in the full blown establishment of a dictatorship in Washington DC, with this Diebold II Congress giving away the store on Day One: "Impeachment is off the table."
And, on Day Two, ESCALATING the war and larding Bush/Cheney with ANOTHER $100 billion in play money to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights.
The sop that they used, to win over the "centrist" election reformers (--who are kind of like the "centrist" re-funders of illegal, unjust, heinous war), was a "paper trail"--admittedly a real ballot, as written (--but who knows what they would have done to that, in the midnight hours?)--but this same bill, Holt 811, left the "trade secret" vote tabulation in place, in all the voting machines and central tabulators, failed to require a significant audit*, and did this in the full knowledge of how difficult it is for ordinary voters and even candidates to get a recount--especially in this new and putrid "culture of secret" that Diebold/ES&S has polluted our election system with. Just try to get election data out of election officials these days. Just try to observe the tabulation computers. You will often meet with every obstruction imaginable. Along with non-transparent vote counting, we have also lost the right to information and access by which we might catch these election thieves in the act.
Elections that are not held in the public venue are not elections. They are tyranny. That's what we have. And if the Democratic leadership in Congress did not, essentially, agree with this country being run as a tyranny, their first act, as a Congress, would have been to rescind the highly corrupt, anti-democratic "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002 (aka, HAVA) and passed a law that said:
1. A ballot for every vote.
2. Count all the votes in public.
Please do not be under the illusion that anything has been "lost" by the death of HR 811. There was no intention of transparency, and anything that could have resulted in transparency would have been removed before the bill before it was passed, or would have combined with the "poison pill" and other conditions to produce more non-transparency.
The political establishment is taking no chances that a 70% American majority against the war will ever be able to elect a president or a congress.
That's what this is all about. Don't buy into the "divide and conquer" tactic that the thousands of real election reform activists who demanded true transparency, and opposed the "poison pill," are responsible for future stolen elections. That's like saying that anti-war activists are responsible for the U.S. "losing" the war on Iraq.
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*(Venezuela uses electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. In 2004, about a third of the U.S. had no audit AT ALL. Zero. Zilch. Unauditable, unrecountable 'voting.' And even the very best of states had--and still have--only a 1% audit. HR 811 proposed 2% to 10%--very, very inadequate when you are dealing with rightwing Bushite corporations, "trade secret" code, and extremely insecure and insider hackable machines. Furthermore, these same election theft corporations often write the auditing programs. The result of all this is a system that is so obscure and so complicated and so outside the understanding of many voters (requiring high level computer expertise) as to effectively disenfranchise most American voters. If you cannot understand and observe how your vote is counted, you are not participating in an election. The election system is inherently fraudulent. These Bushite machines NEVER should have been put in place without a 100% audit in the first several elections, and substantial audits--like Venezuela's 55%--thereafter. And THAT is why Venezuela has an advocate of the poor as president, and a National Assembly that is representative of the majority of Venzuelans, and we have the unspeakable Mr. Bush, his puppetmaster Mr. Cheney, and yet another toady Congress, this time with a 'D' by its name).
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