Act Two: The Struggle Continues

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By Ernest Partridge (about the author) Page 1 of 4 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Ernest Partridge - Writer

Barack Obama is President-Elect, the Democrats have significantly increased their majorities in Congress, the Supreme Court drift to the right has been halted and may soon be reversed, and the Republican Party is in disgrace and disarray.

So is it time, at last, for the Obamaphiles to retire from politics, return to their private lives, and just let Barack be Barack?

If that is to be the prevailing attitude among the millions of ordinary citizens who fell into line and powered the Obama bandwagon to victory last month, then the drive to restore our Constitution and to reestablish economic justice and the rule of law will stall, and the "change we can believe in" will prove to be an empty promise.

For while the right wing oligarchy has been set back by the Obama victory, it has not been defeated. The public-relations/media/think-tank juggernaut that bedeviled and crippled the Clinton presidency is still intact and in operation. The regressive ideology has been repudiated for the moment, but the regressives still have the resources to restore it.

It has happened before. Even though Barry Goldwater was trounced by LBJ in 1964, 60/40 in the popular vote, four years later Richard Nixon reclaimed the White House for the GOP. Bill Clinton's 1992 triumph was crippled just two years later, when Newt Gingrich engineered a Republican take-over of the Congress, followed by the unrelenting harassment and eventual impeachment of Clinton.

A regressive resurgence? It has happened before, and it will happen again, unless a broad-based and persistent progressive movement consigns regressivism to the dustbin of history.

This is a battle that must be waged on many fronts. Here are just five of them:

Election Reform

The incoming Obama administration will put an end to the massive Justice Department campaign to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters, and this welcome development will substantially enhance the prospects of future Democratic candidates.

But the larger problem of election fraud by the private electronic voting industry remains.

On its face, the continuing use of direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines is absurd and indefensible in a nation claiming to be democratic. The crux of this scandal is compellingly simple: these machines, built and programmed by politically biased private individuals, use secret software and are designed to allow no independent audit of their accuracy. Similarly, the computers that compile (add up) the separate vote totals operate with secret software and report election returns that can not be independently verified. Thus there is no direct means to determine whether or not the reported vote totals are the same as the votes actually cast. However, there is an abundance of indirect statistical, anecdotal and empirical evidence that DRE machines have stolen elections, most significantly the presidential election of 2004. (For references, see my "Election 2008: Who Decides? The People or the Programmers?" and follow the links.)

Despite this evidence, the corporate media and the Democratic Party have expressed virtually no concern whatever about a technology that has quite probably robbed the Democrats of several congressional and at least one presidential election.

Will the next Congress revisit the "Help America Vote Act" (HAVA) and mandate independent verification of election returns and the publication of computer source codes? Given the lack of interest in the issue to date, the prospects are not promising. And yet, if the congressional Democrats were to propose such legislation, they would have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Accurate or not (and again, who knows?) widespread doubts about "black box" DRE voting machines have eroded public confidence in election results, and with the loss of confidence comes a loss in the legitimacy of public offices and legislation.

Draft legislation to require verifiable voting methods would put the onus of doubt upon those who opposed it. How could a legislator justify opposition to verifiable elections. Expense? But electronic voting is more costly by far than paper ballots.

Election reform, including the abolition of secret source codes and non-auditable voting machines, is a no-brainer. The public deserves nothing less.

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http://www.crisispapers.org

Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. Partridge has taught philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, (more...)

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