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Edited on Sun Sep-09-07 03:12 PM by Peace Patriot
need to be horsewhipped--exposed, run out of town.
But she's right about it being "a mess." What do you expect when MOST of the members of Congress are beholden to Diebold/ES&S for their power, and not to US?
The county election officials have been trying to stop this bill for their own VERY corrupt reasons. But the principle on which they are doing so--local/state control over elections--is a good one, and may be our salvation, in the end. Congress will do nothing but FUCK UP the election system even more. Forget them. Really. They cannot pass an election reform bill that does not contain very bad "poison pills"--whether it's giving the President of the United States sole power over the "trade secret" code (through a crony "commission"), or blockading local reform efforts by statute or through bribery (more billions of our tax dollars through the fingers of local officials to the rightwing Bushite corporations who now control our elections).
They throw us the sop of a "paper trail," and then throw all this other shit in, to INSURE continued 'TRADE SECRET' CORPORATE CONTROL OF OUR ELECTION OUTCOMES.
It reminds me of Hillary's "health care plan": fuck everything up, complicate it beyond comprehension, pay all kinds of corporations billions and billions of dollars to deal with all these complications, screw the poor and the middle class once again, and everybody who's anybody makes lots and lots and lots money.
Transparent vote counting is a very, very simple thing. You fill out a ballot, and somebody counts all the ballots in public view.
NONE of this complication--and vast expense--is necessary, and it can all be solved with one simple principle: a ballot for every vote; count all the ballots in public view.
They can use expensive electronics--for data storage, for data conveyance, for double-checking the tabulation--or not. A ballot for every vote. Count every vote in public view.
Why is this so difficult? In Venezuela, they handcount 55% (!) of the ballots as a check on machine fraud, and they have an OPEN SOURCE CODE system (no secret code--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated). (Know how much WE handcount? You'd better find out, cuz that's the whole ballgame.) (Hint: You won't believe it, if you don't already know.)
Why don't we have a ballot for every vote, and a public count of the votes--and why didn't we have a 100% handcount for the first few elections using electronics with 'TRADE SECRET' code?
Why?
Therein lies a sorry tale. And if we don't learn this lesson, and take action at the state/local level, to demand and achieve vote counting that everyone can see and understand, our democracy is over.
One of these malevolent county registrars--Connie McCormack of Los Angeles, one of the worst Diebold shills in the country--has resigned, in light of the sunshine that our new California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen (one of the miracles of the '06 elections) is shedding on these criminal election theft corporations and their bought-and-paid-for county election officials.
There is hope. The election reform movement is showing signs of snowballing, and the most effective work being done is at the state/local level. It's still a young movement--only two years old, really. The civil rights movement took about 50 years to get as far as the election reform movement has gotten in 2 years (since the obviously stolen 2004 election). But the hope that a 'Democratic' Congress, which was selected by and shaped by Diebold/ES&S "trade secret" vote counting, would pass a clean election reform bill--a noble and necessary effort--has been something of a distraction. Some groups who call themselves election reformers are actually shilling for the corporate predator fallback position: touchscreens bad, optiscans good--while ignoring the "trade secret" code (the true poison) in the optiscans AND the central tabulators, and preventing a sufficiently stringent audit (automatic recount) to detect fraudulent vote counts. These groups have confused the matter. They are trying to "save" corporate control. (Among them I would count Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, and the big handicapped groups. I don't know why or how their leaders have become corrupt, but they have advocated very corrupt, pro-corporate positions on this.)
If this 'Democratic' Congress had any good intentions (as a whole), it would have repealed HAVA, the moment the Democrats took power. And six months ago, it would have passed a very simple bill, stating the principle, "a ballot for every vote, count all the votes in public view,' whatever system you use. But, of course, our leadership was collusive on HAVA--some of them out of fascist, warmongering and war profiteering motives (the ones who threw the 2004 election), some of them out of venal motives (all those HAVA billions), and some possibly out of fear. HAVA was/is the means to shove the war that most of them voted for down the throats of the American people--56% of whom opposed the Iraq War from the beginning (Feb. '03), and a whopping 70% of whom oppose it now. 56% would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was). 70% is an epochal antiwar majority, which I doubt has ever occurred before in the midst of a war. The war profiteers knew this would happen--a significant majority (56%) growing bigger and bigger, and had to have a mechanism to defeat it. "Trade secret" vote counting was it.*
So THAT'S why they're dicking around with HAVA, not repealing it, and not passing a bill with simple, straightforward principles, in support of the rights of American voters. Many of the actors--Congress clowns and their corporate/NGO support system, and corrupted state/county election officials--DON'T REALLY BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY, and DON'T CARE about the rights of American voters, and, indeed, many--too many--members of this political establishment WANT TO DEFEAT the great, peace-minded, justice-minded, progressive American majority.
That's what IS happening. We are being defeated. 70% want the war ended, and yet the war goes on--and is escalated, and $100 billion more is thrown at it. And it seems to me that the method for defeating us is pretty obvious. And the shenanigans around HAVA in Congress make it even more obvious.
This matter could not be simpler. A ballot for every vote; count all the votes in public. And yet it's all fucked up. You do the math.
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*(HAVA, the so-called "Help America Vote Act," was passed in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution (October 2002), and is closely related to it. The IWR guaranteed unjust war; HAVA provided the means to override the already big American majority opposed to this unjust war--56%--and to keep overriding the majority, as it grew--now to 70%. The latest cleverness and deceit is to give the people the illusion of an opposition Congress, while filling its ranks (30 to 40 seats) with PRO-WAR "Blue Dog" Democrats, who are blockading impeachment of Bush Junta criminals and an end to this horrible, unjust war. HAVA fast-tracked electronic voting systems all over the country--with its $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle and complete lack of controls--during the 2002 to 2004 period, in time, of course, for the first big public vote on the war, 2004. When you vet this voting system NOW, it is simply incredible that this was allowed to happen. And it is also apparent that the Democratic Party leadership was fully collusive.)
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