If you care about your right to vote, you should check this out

[WilliamPitt]

Running on the Right to Vote
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 22 September 2005

There are two kinds of people in American politics today: those who know our basic right to vote and have every vote counted is imperiled, and those who have no idea such a basic right is at risk.

Those who know our voting rights are at risk - from electronic touch-screen voting machines that use unverified software, offer no paper ballots, transfer data via modem to hackable mainframes, and are manufactured by companies whose officers are in the hip pocket of the GOP, and all this is just for starters - have gone to great lengths to inform the uninformed.

They have written books, started websites, done exhaustive research, and harassed elected officials from one side of the country to the other. There have been the occasional success stories, breakthroughs that give hope to those who see this as the single most important issue facing the country. More often than not, however, the back-and-fill of money politics sweeps away their legitimate concerns, and the problem continues to grow.

Enter John Bonifaz.

Those who have been following the slow demise of our right to vote will recognize that name. Bonifaz, a lawyer and constitutional scholar from Boston, is the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI). Since 1994, NVRI and Bonifaz have been on the cutting edge of the defense of voting rights for all Americans. Bonifaz and NVRI were at the forefront of the fight to defend the Massachusetts Clean Elections law, which was overwhelmingly approved by the people but defunded by the threatened politicos in the state legislature. Bonifaz and NVRI won a landmark ruling from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on this issue, forcing the state to provide the necessary funds to all qualified candidates running in the 2002 state elections.

Bonifaz and NVRI have also been fighting against the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that equated unlimited campaign money and spending as free speech. Their work on this has been aimed at defending mandatory campaign spending limits, public financing of elections, and other important campaign reforms.

More recently, Bonifaz threw himself completely into the fight for a recount of all votes cast in the overwhelmingly shady presidential vote in Ohio in 2004. An amazing number of complaints from voters, as well as reports of outright fraud by eyewitnesses, continues to stain the official outcome of that all-important vote. Bonifaz represented Green Party candidates Michael Badnarik and David Cobb in their ongoing legal challenge to this vote, and was able to bring John Kerry and John Edwards into the suit. We know today about what really happened in Ohio last November because of Badnarik, Cobb and John Bonifaz.

John Bonifaz is thinking about running for the office of Secretary of State for Massachusetts in the upcoming 2006 election.

(snip)

Mr. Bonifaz has not yet decided to run, and a number of factors must come into focus before a decision is made. First and foremost, his exploratory committee must establish sound fundraising processes, and have to figure out early if the money will be there for a statewide campaign.

More:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/092205I.shtml

If you are interested in helping out, this is the pledge link:

http://www.johnbonifaz.com/pledge

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