OpEdNews » Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System

Support OEN
With Your
Tax-Deductible Donation

Tags for This Article:

Populum Tag Cloud Control Panel
	Fine tune your search to access content

Articles	Links
Diaries	Products
Events	All

All time
Last 6 mos
Last month
Last week
Last 24 hrs

From:
Month Day Year

To:
Month Day Year

Alphabet Popularity	Count ON Count OFF
This Level	Sub-levels

Tag(s): 2004 Election; 2006 Elections; Atlanta; Discrimination; Disenfranchisement; Electronic Voting; Georgia; Media Documentary; State Government; Voter Disenfranchisement; (more...) Voting Integrity; Voting Technology (less...)
Add to My Group

November 2, 2006 at 19:28:44

Eternal Vigilance: The Fight to Save Our Election System

by Joan Brunwasser Page 2 of 2 page(s)

www.opednews.com

SAVE FAVORITES

VIEW FAVORITES

View Ratings | Rate It

Now that everyone is worried about the Venezuelan connection to Sequoia, maybe McPherson will recommend dumping all of those machines and purchasing Diebold instead. After all, they have a stellar record of proving to be totally untrustworthy in every regard, and have flunked every independent study ever done. While I distrust electronic voting, however much it's been heralded as the answer to hanging chads, I do not doubt that we would be better off had the TruVote system been the electronic voting method in use now. Bob Fitrakis calls Athan Gibbs the first martyr in the 21st century battle for voting integrity. I agree. Whether we know it or not, we are all reeling from that loss.

At the conclusion of the Nashville conference, Bernie Ellis speaks eloquently about the long and hard road ahead. His acknowledgment that "We are the ones we've been waiting for" helps the conference participants (and us) translate the despair after 2004 into working for change. Now is the time to draw on our inner strength, to gird our loins, and to prepare to fight to get back our democracy.

I'd like to conclude with an excerpt from Bob Koehler's article "The Silent Scream":
"In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people's choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, except average Americans who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back. No one, except us."

1 | 2

Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which exists for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. We aim to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Electronic (computerized) voting systems are simply antithetical to democratic principles.

CER set up a lending library to achieve the widespread distribution of the DVD Invisible Ballots: A temptation for electronic vote fraud. Within eighteen months, the project had distributed over 3200 copies across the country and beyond. CER now concentrates on group showings, OpEd pieces, articles, reviews, interviews, discussion sessions, networking, conferences, anything that promotes awareness of this critical problem. Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005.