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to see, and it is this: our own party's complicity in fast-tracking electronic voting machines all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virutually no audit/recount controls.
Once you understand how complicit they have been in destroying our election system--handing it over to Bushites, to be run on secret code, with no controls---and thus disempowering the American people, at the source of their power over public officials--our right to vote--a lot of things begin to fall it place. For instance, how can it be that 70% of the American people oppose the Iraq War and want it ended, and yet the new 'Democratic' Congress, purportedly elected with this staggering, epochal anti-war mandate, instead ESCALATE the war, with 30,000 MORE troops, and lard Bush and Cheney with $100 billion MORE of our tax dollars to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights?
It's not that our party leaders "don't have enough votes" in Congress to impeach these war criminals and stop their horrid war; it's that our party leaders DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE enough votes to do so. If they did want to remove these criminals and stop their war, they would have long ago cried foul on "trade secret" vote counting. Instead, they not only voted FOR it, in huge numbers, and not only encouraged and lavishly funded it (to the tune of the $3.9 billion), and not only didn't even try to attach audit/recount and other controls, and not only didn't warn voters about it, they have done everything in their power to COVER IT UP, including forbidding any talk of election fraud!
And when you look back at the history of this--how and when the "Help America Vote Act" (e-voting with secret code) was passed--the picture of our leadership becomes even more appalling. HAVA was passed, by the Anthrax Congress, in same month as the Iraq War Resolution (October 2002). The IWR guaranteed unjust war; HAVA provided the means to shove that unjust war down the throats of the American people, as the majority against the Iraq War, which BEGAN at 56%--a significant majority--just before the war was instigated (Feb. '03) and has now grown to an amazing 70%. The outline of what happened is clear now. It was to defeat that great, peace-minded, justice-minded, progressive American majority that "trade secret" vote counting was devised at the same time, in parallel to the war. The rest of us may not have been aware that the majority of Americans opposed the war at the beginning. It was kept well out of the headlines. But the political establishment was well aware of it--56% would be a landslide in a presidential election (and believe me, it was); they knew it would only get bigger, and took measures to thwart it--namely, taking DIRECT control on our election outcomes, so that they could shape a pro-war Congress with a 'D' in front of its name.
This purported 'Democratic' Congress is very nearly the FLIP-SIDE of the American people as a whole. 70% of the people oppose the war; about 60% of the Congress supports it (in their votes, if not in the lies they spin for the public).
What a trick!
I am a lifelong Democrat--with a record of 40 years as a Democratic Party voter, donor and supporter. I've seen a lot of grief and even horror from your party leaders, including the worst horror of all, the Vietnam War. But I have never seen anything like this fundamental betrayal of democracy itself.
"Trade secret" vote counting, on extremely insecure and insider hackable voting machines, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, means that we have NO CHANCE to change things. We can outvote the fascists, and out-fundraise them, and outdo them in every way. We are the majority! But we cannot implement even the most basic reforms, if fascists are counting all our votes--or rather not counting them--with "trade secret" code that they say we have no right to see, and with no audit/recount controls.
And the chief obstacle to reforming this Stalinist election system is our own party leadership! Their silence. Their complicity. Their corruption. Their treason.
I don't think Howard Dean goes along; and I think he is aware of the problem. But I think the good Democratic leaders that are out there--and there are some--somehow have their tongues tied, and their hands tied. Perhaps it is just such a huge scandal--going to the very legitimacy of our government--that they are are afraid of it, or are fearful for some other reason. There are cracks in the "Iron Curtain" they've placed over this subject--cracks created by grass roots revolt, for instance in California, where the Progressive Democrats got election reformer Debra Bowen nominated and then elected, as Sec of State--against a Republican tide in state offices, and a against a Diebold-complicit state party leadership. So there is hope--at the state/local level.
But, I think, to understand what is happening in Congress--how it can be so oblivious to public opinion--we have to understand who they are now beholden to, for their power--Diebold and ES&S.
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