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Good point! And I've raised it a couple of times in posts on this subject.
It is very important to put this bill--and all election reform issues--in context, both past context (who got us here in the first place, and how much can we trust them now?), current context (Bush junta in trouble, prospects for passage), and future context (the fate of American democracy, the rights of future generations).
There are enormous dangers in THIS Congress addressing itself to "election reform"--arguably a worse, more unrepresentative, more fascist bunch of Bush "pod people" and corporatist, pro-war Democrats than the Anthrax Congress that passed the "Help America Vote For Bush Act."
HR 550 has had a resurgence probably because elections are imminent, and because opinion poll disapproval of the Bush junta has been at 60% to 70% all year with no prospect of improvement. Democrats and especially Democrats who represent the majority in this country--leftist, antiwar Democrats--would rightfully sweep Congress in unrigged elections, but will be lucky to even come close to a majority in Congress with Diebold's and ES&S's 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites and warmongers. And a lot more people, among the grass roots, are aware of this than in 2004. So ALL Democratic office holders and candidates are probably getting an earful from the grass roots, and have to at least LOOK LIKE they are doing something about it. Thus, a flurry of discussion about HR 550.
What are its prospects? Zilch, unless it is amended to suit Bush's "pod people." And if it is weakened any further--or includes poison pills from the criminals--some co-sponsors will drop off, and some will stay on and falsely "sell" it as "election reform." The Congressional Democrats have an utterly dismal record at preventing fascist bills and other terrible actions (such as Dimwit appointing the Supreme Court). Will the co-sponsors hold firm on the positive aspects of this bill, if there is movement on the bill? Some won't--and that will be the end of that. (Some will only want cosmetic reform--something they can "sell"). Will it get anywhere this year? Probably not, unless the bad guys see it as a cipher that they can use to advance HAVA (Tom Delay/Bob Ney/Chris Dodd) goals of corruption and non-transparency.
One danger is that, if, by some miracle--say, massive voter turnout in '06 that defeats the machines--the Democrats gain some strength in Congress, HR 550--which has been described by people who should know better as "the gold standard of election reform"--will be all we get even from an insurgent Congress. No repeal of HAVA. No cleaning of house in our election system. Further entrenchment of private, rightwing corporations--who will fight us every step of the way, on compliance and interpretation, and have the financial and legal resources to do so. Rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, for instance, who initially funded ES&S when it split off from Diebold, and who also gave a million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (who tout the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things), is not likely to give up on rightwing-controlled elections. HR 550 means that we will be fighting this battle for decades to come.
The problem is not just the current, complete non-transparency in our elections. The problem is PRIVATIZATION of our elections. And THAT is the thing that many Democratic leaders are attached to. Big money. Big contracts. Corporate boondoggle. Power over the money. And OTHER electronics contracts with the gov't. (In Calif, for instance, Diebold doesn't just get lots and lots of money for their crapass voting systems, they ALSO run U. of Calif. database systems, and other aspects of gov't. THAT is probably why the Calif Dems caved on the witchhunt against Kevin Shelley (that, and fear).)
So the Democrats want to SAVE electronic voting. That's what HR 550 is all about--I'm realizing late in the day. It's a pretty good bill, if you don't know the HISTORY of this matter--that is, if you don't realize what a terrible scam HAVA was to begin with, and what a coup for the fascists! It tries to SAVE electronic voting with measures that should never have been missing in the first place--paper ballots for recounts, publicly reviewable source code, required audits--and that Democratic leaders should have screamed bloody murder about, way back when. Now that the fascists are entrenched, in the courts, in the military and intelligence communities, and in our election system, and now that the rich have had all the tax cuts they could conceivably desire, and all the deregulation, and now that secrecy, domestic spying, torture, war, and blatant lawbreaking by the executive have been set up as precedents, and now that our Corporate Rulers are completely out of control, the Democrats want to give us a paper ballot and the bare minimum of auditing (2%).
And that's probably the limit of what we will get even from a Congress with a Democratic edge, in the near future anyway. (Wilms, you suggest that Holt may have a stronger bill in the file cabinet, in case Congress changes color. I'll believe it when it see it.)
Prospects for HR 550 this year? Nil--to be realistic. Prospects after the '06 elections--probably better. Prospects for 100% transparency--the REAL "gold standard" of elections--not any time soon. With HR 550, should it pass as is, we'll still be fighting Diebold and ES&S and their entrenched advocates (both Dem and Repub) far into the foreseeable future--over interpretation and compliance.
Maybe the only way to achieve 100% transparency is to embed that principle--the bottom line of democracy; full voter confidence in elections--in a general platform of anti-corporatism. And that means either a new political party, or radical reform of one of the two current major parties. The Corporatists are doing enormous harm to our democracy--not to mention to the planet--on many fronts. We really need a revolution against THEM. We need to de-charter the worst of them, dismantle them, seize their assets for the public good, and let that be a lesson to the others. (Thomas Jefferson wanted the Feds to have that power, but had to compromise in giving it to the states, which are the entities that now charter corporations. He greatly feared corporations, and hoped that the states--closer to the people--would keep them in control. He probably couldn't have imagined our situation--the vastness of the corruption, with BOTH the federal government AND the state governments taken over by corporations, including the counting of our votes! He would be aghast.)
If you merely try to tweak a corporatized government system--to make it fairer, to make it not so onerous--you will end up with a fascist junta. That's what big, rich, powerful corporations WILL do, if you don't keep a tight reign on them. That should be the lesson of "the Reagan years"--wherein the rewrite of the tax code to favor the rich and "globalization" began--and to some extent of the Clinton administration--the coup de grace of NAFTA (and no universal health care). But now that we are here, in the midst of the fascist coup, we don't have the power to just go back to square one (say, the Carter administration). We have to climb back out of this hole one way or another.
I totally sympathize with Land Shark's point that elections are either transparent or they are NOT elections. They are tyranny. He is correct. You can't--or you shouldn't--compromise on the BOTTOM LINE of democracy. And that IS what we are talking about--the bottom line. There is no lower ground--that you can call "democracy."
But we can't get there, in current circumstances. We can't even get HR 550 passed--a positive tweak to the electronic systems--let alone insure 100% transparency.
Maybe THAT is what we need to realize--and many of us have been too privileged all our lives to realize it. This is a FASCIST COUP. And we have been stripped of our rights as citizens. Our sovereignty as a people is GONE. So, how do we get it back?
I'm reminded of the INCREMENTAL ways by which black citizens GRADUALLY fought for full citizenship--starting WAY BACK at the turn of the 19th/20th century and before. I don't know where I picked this up, but the black railroad porters of the early 20th century where clever men who listened very closely when the white passengers they were serving talked about their financial investments, and began socking money away in interest-bearing accounts and other investments, to pay for college educations for their KIDS. These were people who were denied voting rights in the south, and denied full citizenship everywhere else, and were the victims of intense bigotry. The porters' union was a refuge and a strength, amidst vast discrimination. Meanwhile, blacks were serving in the military--in a sense, establishing their credentials as Americans--and ALSO learning about parts of the country and parts of the world where segregation, and lynchings, and poll taxes, did not exist, or at least not as severely as they existed in the rural South. These were the SEEDS of the civil rights movement: educated black children who could see beyond the borders of segregation, Truman's desegregation of the Army after WW II, and also the strength of the movement, black churches, with their strong organization and community cohesion--the work of many good people over many decades.
Incremental change, on FUNDAMENTAL rights. There WAS no other way. The power weighing against black citizens was too great. You got out of line, you were lynched. And you might be lynched even if you didn't get out of line.
The oppression of the our Corporate Rulers is subtler, on the whole, but no less lethal to our rights as citizens and human beings. The Bush junta has done us the favor of exposing this oppression, ripping the veils from our eyes, so that we can see it in all its naked ugliness. We are nothing more than slaves and cannon fodder to these Rulers. The dead bodies of US soldiers, or of poor blacks in New Orleans, or of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, mean NOTHING to them. NOTHING! They are cold-ass S.O.B.s who would just as soon see Howard Ahmanson burn you at the stake, as look at you. Freedom for them is the freedom to loot, the freedom to kill, and the freedom to torture for PROFIT--and the freedom to DESTROY this democracy in order to do so.
Perhaps we need to get rid of our illusions that we can easily tweak this government/political system back to democracy. And maybe that's where LandShark goes wrong in opposing incremental transparency. He is right, of course. Partial transparency in elections violates the very definition of elections. And maybe things are not so dire for us as they were for blacks in the south in the late 19th and through the mid-20th centuries--not yet anyway. But things are pretty damned bad when we have to beg our own political party to support PARTIAL transparency. Further, the Bush fascists and their colluders are bankrupting a lot of us--with cruel medical costs, gas price gouging, loss of jobs, poor wages, usurious credit card charges, and the whole bag of fascist crimes, PLUS trillions of dollars of federal debt. Our very ability to be citizens is under assault. How can you be a good citizen--in this new world of speed-of-light financial and election theft, and massive gov't secrecy, and thievery by the rich--if you are working two low paying jobs to feed your children, and can't afford a visit to the doctor if you get sick?
Well, ask somebody's black grandfather or grandmother! You do it be being smart, and having faith and heart, and advancing one step at a time. You do it by fully realizing your situation, evaluating it realistically, and hanging in there, to move things along with each incremental change.
Thomas Jefferson had a fight with his southern brethren over his proposal to include an anti-slavery plank in the Declaration of Independence. He lost. As for his own slaves, if he had freed them, they would have been banned from Virginia. He took several of his slaves to France with him, when he was the US ambassador, and they could have left him there, in revolutionary France, but they didn't. Probably they were a family--one that could not be recognized in Virginia at the time. There was no way to free this family from the severe bigotry and slave laws of the era, short of abandoning the U.S.A. altogether. Jefferson loathed slavery. He wrote about its corrosive effects on the psychology of both whites and blacks. But he couldn't get it overturned. The upshot is that SOMETIMES you just have to have faith in the future. You can't have it all now. It is not possible. You have to plant the seeds and hope for the best, and never give up on the human race and its inherent yearning for enlightenment and for freedom and progress.
We are slaves to our Corporate Rulers, whether we know it or not. Incremental change, planting the seeds, and having faith in the future may be all that we can do. HR 550 is like a "Declaration of Independence" without an anti-slavery provision. It is misshapen. It is not true to itself. It is a compromise with fascist corporations who have done us great harm. But it DOES re-establish the principle of a seeable, countable paper ballot, as well as auditability, and open source code. I doubt that it will see the light of day. But there were likely a lot of similar doubts about the Declaration of Independence, even with the southern slaveholders on board. You never know. There are a lot of good groups and good people behind it.
The Declaration of Independence left the fight over slavery to future generations. Similarly, we may have to swallow a 2% audit, and the further entrenchment of electronic voting and privatization, in order to start a movement toward transparency and freedom from Corporate Rule. But, as I have said elsehwere, we need to do it with OPEN EYES. I thank LandShark for that--for scrutinizing this bill very closely, and pointing to the loopholes and pitfalls. It's not as if we have never been fooled before--by our own party!
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