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1. The huge Absentee Ballot vote this time--VOTERS' REVOLT
The war profiteering corporate news monopolies (NYT, AP, WSJ, Sacto Bee) started spinning this one about two weeks ago--using similar language saying the huge increase in Absentee Ballot voting is voters "choosing convenience," with the WSJ descrying the big AB vote as disruptive and an annoyance to election officials who want instant results. None of them mention voter distrust of the electronic voting machines even as a possibility! Why are they spinning this so hard?
I think what we are looking at is a huge VOTERS' REBELLION AGAINST THE MACHINES: Ordinary voters are BOYCOTTING the machines, in big numbers. They've gotten the word, and are trying to get around the rigged electronics by voting with an Absentee Ballot. This huge increase in the AB vote--half the state of California voting by AB; it's also big in VA, and has dramatically increased in all 30 states that permit AB voting--is a very positive indication all by itself. It tells us, 1) all these voters know what's going on, and 2) they want to DO something about it.
This gives us a STRATEGY for achieving transparent, verifiable vote counting--something that has been sorely lacking in the election reform movement. We have a CAMPAIGN. We do NOT have a strategy. That's why we have been unsuccessful at practical reform and why voting systems have remained opaque and highly riggable throughout the country. We HAVE been successful at raising consciousness--very successful--but we have NOT come up with even a suggestion on how, practically, to achieve our goal--especially given the biggest obstacle to that goal--the entrenched corruption of both Dem and Repub election officials and legislators connected to the $3.9 billion in e-voting contracts.
Well, ordinary people have now given us that strategy on a silver platter. It will not help us that much today, but it WILL help us TOMORROW--looking to the '08 primaries and general election.
And it is this: Mobilize this huge block of distrustful voters and put pressure on LOCAL officials to, a) HAND COUNT the Absentee Ballot votes, and b) POST the results BEFORE any electronics are involved. These simple, common sense demands are achievable at the LOCAL level. And with success, then extend these demands to the optiscan ballots. Count them first, post the results, and then, and only then, send the data to the central tabulators. With this strategy, we don't have to get rid of the multi-million dollar contracts. We don't have to bring Diebold down with corruption scandals, or win any lawsuits. We don't have to buck the corrupt officials in our own party. We just organize the EXISTING base of rebellious AB voters, and get these simple things done in every local jurisdiction.
We will thus have created a paper ballot system BY DEFAULT.
This strategy circumvents a head-on collision with evil and dangerous e-voting corporations and their lackeys in government. It gives the remaining HONEST officials a chance to do the right thing. It gives the dishonest ones a face-saving position. (If they want to keep their jobs, and not be run out of town on a rail by outraged citzens, they will yield to AB voters' demands; they will likely resist on the optiscans and try to preserve that non-transparency--but we will have them on the run.) The other big fraud device--the touchscreens (paperless, or worthless paper "receipt," voting--will seem more and more absurd as the AB/optiscan strategy succeeds, and, if we do get a Dem majority in the House, we may be able to get a federal ban on the touchscreens (although I don't put faith in ANY federal reform; even a Dem Congress could just as well make things worse as make them slightly better).
It has ALWAYS been up to the People. Our government TOOK AWAY OUR RIGHT TO VOTE. But HOW do the People get it back? This is the HOW.
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2. What is the nature of the corruption we are dealing with?
Autorank touches on most of the important factors, but doesn't emphasize the most startling facts about WHO has taken over our voting system, HOW it was taken over, and HOW they are "counting" our votes.
Almost all votes in the country are now "counted" by BUSHITE electronic voting corporations, using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--in ALL of the electronic voting machines and central tabulators. And ALL of the machines are extremely insecure and insider hackable. (And even Absentee Ballot votes are scanned or entered into these highly riggable electronic systems.)
This fascist coup--the wholesale removal of transparency from our election system--was engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney--abetted by corporatist 'Democrats' like Christopher Dodd--with the worst piece of crap legislation ever passed by a U.S. Congress with the exception of the recent torture bill: The so-called "Help America Vote Act" of 2002. They appropriated $3.9 billion dollars for the fast-track conversion of our voting system to NON-TRANSPARENT electronics, owned and controlled mainly by two corporations with very close ties to the Bush regime and far rightwing causes. And they are:
DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy. And they are even more entrenched now, as to actual rigged systems in place. The election reform movement has succeeded in casting doubt on these systems, but not on removing them or stopping their spread.
Also, SEQUOIA: The third big election theft player, which hired Republican Bill Jones, former Calif Secretary of State, and his chief aide, Alfie Charles, to peddle their machines--in an outstanding example of the highly corrupt practice of "revolving door" employment--one of a number of corrupt practices that HAVA encourages. The list includes lavish lobbying, corporate secrecy, corporate lawyers writing our election laws, the election theft industry "testing" its own machines in a quasi-government capacity, industry campaign contributions, and lack of oversight and accountability by a Bushite-controlled federal election commission.
And one final wretched fact: ALL but two* of our Democratic Senators voted FOR this horrible bill (as did most of the Dem House members)! --and, furthermore, our Democratic Party leadership was MIND-BOGGLINGLY SILENT, as these rightwing corporations took over our election system, in the leadup to the 2004 election. Silent as lambs. Not a word of objection. (And in California, we had the state party leadership colluding with the Dark Lords to force a GOOD, anti-Diebold Sec of State--Kevin Shelley--out of office, and to replace him with a Diebold shill, appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger.)
So, the conclusion is inescapable that what we are looking at, here, is not just a Bushite plot. It is a CORPORATE plot. And that surmise, if true, may well have implications for what happens today.
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3. The most likely scenario for today's Congressional elections (my prediction).
We are likely NOT going to see an across-the-board massive theft, as in 2004. The election reform and political scenes in the country are both much improved since 2004, and this means that the election theft industry will be in danger of losing their election theft capability for future purposes, if they steal it too big this time. So I expect a carefully crafted Democratic majority in the House, that looks like a Democratic victory, but really isn't. It will have a large component of "Bushite Democrats" like those who voted for torture and suspension of habeas corpus, pre-selected in the primaries, and holding the swing vote position in Congress, to prevent impeachment, to hamper serious investigation, and to limit real reform. Just think of a lot of Joe Lieberman's screwing things up.
And, speaking of Lieberman, I expect that he will be THE swing vote in the Senate. I think it will be a 50/50 split, and the REAL Democrats will have to go to Lieberman on all important issues. It's interesting that such a pivotal race is being conducted not by Diebold, but on the old-fashioned, unriggable lever voting machines. As with NY, CT has resisted the change. However, CT recently introduced a central electronic tabulator which could well be a factor. And I strongly suspect all kinds of OTHER shenanigans in CT--it is the war profiteers' most important race. Credit Ned Lamont with sparking the American peoples' rebellion against the Iraq War. He is the Eugene McCarthy of this era. (McCarthy was the anti-Vietnam war presidential candidate who lost in New Hampshire, but nevertheless did so well that he caused LBJ to drop out of the 1968 presidential race and not seek a second term). Lamont will not, and cannot, be permitted to win. Lieberman will mean CONTINUATION of the Iraq War, in the teeth of 70% opposition by the American people.
The Dieboldization of our elections has mostly BEEN about the war. The American people have been against the war from the beginning (56% opposed, way back in Feb. '03, before the invasion). How do you get the U.S. war machine committed in the Middle East, and proceed with an unjust, unpopular, heinous war, in a democracy? You have to fix the elections. And that's what they did.
Lieberman's role--and the role of other "Bushite Democrats"--will be to keep us in Iraq indefinitely--as plan after plan for "withdrawal" gets amended and delayed.
But there is another factor in play, and that is Corporate Rule--that is, the long term goals of corporate secrecy in the counting of all our votes. These have to do more with placing the burden of this $10 TRILLION war debt on the poor and middle class, and preserving and consolidating the Corporate Rulers' enormous gains, under Bush, on tax breaks for the super-rich, deregulation, global free piracy, and monopolistic rightwing control of the news media. There is some evidence that Bush and the Iraq war have become "bad for business." The Corporate Rulers' propaganda organs hitting the Bushites with an old pedophile sex scandal four weeks before the election is evidence that such a split may be in progress. For one thing, the Bushites have neglected South America, which has meanwhile undergone an amazing, peaceful, democratic, leftist (majorityist) revolution, in country after country (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador--with big new leftist movements in Peru, and to the north in Mexico and Nicaragua). One of our Corporate Rulers' main landscapes of exploitation is in serious revolt.
And some sort of split developing between the Bushites and the Corporate Rulers makes sense in other respects. The pigsty looting of our treasury, and of the Iraqis, has almost run its course. The well is drying up. And they have North Americans on the ropes already. They are well into the Social Security fund, and government pension funds. The South Americans have been meanwhile building up some resources that can be looted, and, just as with California--where the Democrats accumulated a $10 billion surplus, and Enron and other Texas energy companies, like sharks to blood, moved in to steal it--countries like Venezuela and Argentina, both now with good leftist governments, are creating wealth. And Latin America also still has vast reserves of gas, oil and minerals that are in danger of benefiting the poor. The Bushite death squads have been too occupied in Iraq to do much about it (--although the Bushites managed to appropriate millions of dollars to funnel to Hugo Chavez's opposition in Venezuela, and to wield against other leftist governments, and a whopping $600 million this year alone for killing peasants and leftists in Columbia, and nearby states like Paraguay (where the Bush Cartel is purchasing a 200,000 acre enclave near a new, U.S.-taxpayer funded military airbase)).
Anyway, since Iraq/Iran oil has not been the easy pickins' that the NeoCons said it would be, the Corporate Rulers need other fields to plow, and may figure that "free trade" Clintonism needs to stage a comeback, sans in-your-face fascism. Indeed, the American people will likely be dancing in the streets over mere Corporate Rule, at this point (--not gathering by the 50,000s to protest it, and STOP it, as we did in Seattle in 1999).
So-o-o-o-o--o, the biggest danger that I see is that a weak Democratic win in the House will dampen the election reform movement, and create an illusion of democracy, and that fundamental problems, like this new corporate privatization of our election system, will remain endemic. And if the Dems get too caught up with the Middle East situation, and, say, institute a military Draft--and/or, the Corporate welfare economy collapses-- we may see serious civil unrest, and a ripping apart of center/left, as occurred in Germany in the early 1930s. We have to hold together this "illusion" of democracy, while reforming it, and trying to make it real.
A very difficult task. Can you imagine the temptation to rip the Democratic Party to shreds if they institute a Draft? And we ALREADY have corporate Democrats like Harold Ford talking about a "balanced budget." (We know what THAT means!) (As FDR knew, a "balanced budget" is NOT the answer to a looted economy!)
Many thanks to Autorank and TIA for these excellent tools with which to analyze today's results! Onward, Patriots! We WILL get our country back--I'm convinced of that--but it ain't going to be quick or easy.
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*(Note: The only two Senate votes against HAVA in the Anthrax Congress were...Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer! Go figure! It could have something to do with New Yorker's attachment to their old, reliable, and virtually unriggable, mechanical lever voting machines. NY has strongly resisted the conversion to electronics. It's hard to believe that Clinton and Schumer actually believe in democracy--given their other positions on vital issues. But, frankly, I was floored when I found out who voted against HAVA--and that only two Senators did. I'm still puzzled about it. One other interesting fact: Christopher Dodd--a frequenter of the Bilderberg Group and one of HAVA's biggest proponents--was John Kerry's key adviser on electronic voting for the 2004 election, and assured Kerry that all was well. Dodd announced his exploratory bid for president in '08 on the Al Franken Show about a month ago--with a substitute host. He said that Hillary was "in trouble with the antiwar crowd," and we don't want "losers" like Gore and Kerry to be our candidate, and that leaves HIM. I just about choked on my coffee.)
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