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Edited on Wed Feb-07-07 09:39 AM by Peace Patriot
election system--and have tremendous admiration for those who are fighting this fight--they are the founding mothers and fathers of American Revolution II--I have to descry the Holt bill's and the Democratic Party's intention to reward these criminal rightwing Bushite electronic voting corporations with billions of more taxpayer dollars--for wildly expensive upgrades, for printers, for "patches," for servicing contracts and all the other private profiteering in our election system. It is OUTRAGEOUS that these corporations should be REWARDED for destroying our election system!
Our votes are now being "counted" with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it--owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations. 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; until recently, they were run by two brothers, Bob and Tod Urosevich. (One of them got outa Dodge last year--can't recall which one.)
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy--and who are going to be rewarded with billions more in contracts, to patch up a system that was designed to re-(s)elect George Bush and Dick Cheney in 2004, and to manufacture a completely phony endorsement of their heinous war and other fascist policies.
Recently, in the FL-13 Congressional race, ES&S voting machines 'disappeared' 18,000 Democratic votes for Congress, in a race that was decided by some 300 votes, and when the "losing" candidate asked ES&S to disclose its "TRADE SECRET" vote counting code, to see if something might be wrong with it, they REFUSED, and the first judge it went to said that ES&S's private property rights trump any right of the voters to know how their votes are counted!
The matter is now in Congress, and may or may not be remedied. My point is, what the hell are we arguing about here? HOW CAN PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS BE USED TO HIDE VOTE COUNTING? What the hell have they DONE to our voting system?!
The architects of this Stalinist vote counting system were the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by corporatist 'Democrat' Christopher Dodd and by the silence, if not collusion, of Terry McAullife). Their vehicle was the "Help America Vote for Bush" Act of 2002--a $3.9 electronic voting boondoggle that, combined with unregulated lavish lobbying, was used to entice, bribe and bully election officials and legislators across the land, who eagerly purchased the most crapass, insecure, insider hackable voting systems that these Bushite corporations could devise.
As I understand it, the Holt bill--among other grave defects--leaves the secretly coded CENTRAL ELECTRONIC TABULATORS in place, and puts the burden of proving fraud on grass roots citizen groups, voters and candidates, who have to mount fundraising campaigns and media campaigns just to get a recount, with the rules stacked against them. This is BACKWARDS. The burden of proof should be on officialdom. THEY have to establish a COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT voting counting system that EVERYONE CAN SEE AND UNDERSTAND. Anything less than that is NOT democracy.
The Holt bill requires a 2% audit (automatic handcount). This is slightly better than the current situation in which some states do 0%, and the best--the best!--do 1%! In Venezuela, they audit FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the votes, cuz they don't trust the machines--and, let me tell you, they get a lot better RESULT from their elections than we do from ours! --in officeholders who are beholden to the people and not to war profiteers, fascists and global corporate predators.
Kathy Dopp is trying to improve the Holt bill's auditing system--and bless her for that, and blessings to all the brilliant and good people who are trying to restore transparent vote counting. I just had to rant about this, because I am so shocked and so disappointed by our Democratic leadership, and their initial collusion with this "Big Brother" vote counting system, and their failure to do anything but patch it up now.
You gotta wonder how it is that SEVENTY-FOUR PERCENT of the American people want the Iraq War ENDED, yet Bush and his puppetmaster Cheney are not only ESCALATING that war, they are intent upon starting another one--and Congress can't even get it up to pass a NON-BINDING resolution against the first one! Even with the Democratic victories in the '06 elections, we STILL don't have a Congress that truly represents the American people. And I think it's patently obvious that, 1) these secretly coded voting machines are putting a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists, and 2) the voters were so mad they outvoted the machines! -but with that big handicap, they still couldn't get a responsive Congress.
So, people who were themselves (s)elected by Diebold/ES&S--including many Democrats--are now setting about "reforming" the election system just enough so that it looks like they are doing something, but not enough to seriously interfere with that "thumb on the scales." I have no doubt that SOME Democrats were genuinely elected. I am quite certain that almost no Republicans were. Then there is that middle group--the so-called "'Blue Dog" Democrats (moles, wingers, who want to cut everything but the war budget!)--who were put in place to obstruct impeachment, to prevent an end to the war and to stymie all progressive policy. (And in the Senate, we not only had the problem of Diebold/ES&S's secret code--only 1/3 of the Senate was up for reelection this time--so the Senate is still full of rightwing dinosaurs and Bush "pod people.")
This is the situation, in my opinion. You wonder why the Democrats are not stringing Bush and Cheney up from the nearest Washington DC lamp posts, and Diebold and ES&S executives with them? This is why.
You can't have an unjust, illegal war, in a democracy, without rigging the elections. That's what they did--and that's what they will continue to do, until we restore transparent vote counting by action and pressure at the local/state level, where ordinary people still have some influence. The Holt bill is an inch forward, when we need a mile. It's going to be a long road, my friends. But consider South America, and the awesome, peaceful, democratic, leftist (majorityist) revolution that is occurring there now, after decades and centuries of brutality and exploitation. They now have leftist (majorityist) governments in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezeula, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Nicaragua (and big leftist movements in Peru, Paraguay and Mexico--likely to bear fruit in the next election cycle). Here are the lessons of that struggle...
1. TRANSPARENT elections.
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.
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