Your money or your life That old cliché, “Your money or your life,” is pretty much covered in the two scenarios described in this article. One strips victims of their money, as well as their privacy, and perhaps their identity as well. The other deprives them of their constitutional right to vote within our democratic system, which is the cornerstone of the American way of life. You can always get a new credit card and fight for your credit rating. But recovering our democratic right to accurate, safe, and verifiable elections has proven to be a lot trickier. If the credit card scandal above made you nervous, you should be downright panic-stricken about the state of our elections. The scope is far broader; election theft affects the very essence of what we are and what we hope to be. It remains to be seen what we are prepared to do about it.
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.
This is a great article because it explains things in a way that nobody can misunderstand or shrug off as a mere glitch. This is a total lack of security in what should be the most secure process in a democracy.
One problem with technology is that it always needs security updates, because whatever one person contrives, another can circumvent. But the programmer hasn't been born who can hack a #2 pencil.
Digg it!
by
Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments)
on Monday, December 3, 2007 at 9:46:04 PM
I watched that 60 Minutes piece and wondered how it applied to vote-hacking. Thanks for putting it all together--and I do mean all. This is a concrete, complete summing up of what Brunwasser knows. And that's everything. I'm forwarding the link to everyone I know.
by
Ann Medlock (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments)
on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 12:05:06 PM
I think this will be a great article to post on all the blindness-related lists because it compares electronic voting with identity theft, a real concern for blind people since we have to trust so many people with very personal information, and we can't verify that the information they share on our behalf is either correct, or that our information is not stolen. We so often have to tell someone else our PIN, or, in some cases, help us use a signature stamp, (thank goodness I learned how to write my signature), that sometimes it feels as though we have no privacy left at all.
Perhaps, if some blind people can see the problem in these terms, they might think twice.
Where else do you place it (I know it's long, but...)
We're trying to incrementally police LA County, between Registrars.
The whole thing is so difficult. But we just have to keep going.
Computers aren't secure. Yet they keep us in touch. They fit into busy lives that are about, increasingly, keeping ourselves and our dependents alive, out of jail, and in some kind of shelter, not on the streets.
The fraudulently-elected administration has made sure it can screw with those plans if it feels threatened by democracy. And so many Americans think it can't, won't, happen here.
Yet with informed people - and a new generation getting involved - we're waking people up.
Peace,
Mimi Kennedy
California Election Protection Network
Chair, Progressive Democrats of America
by
Joan Brunwasser (164 articles, 3538 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 634 comments)
on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at 4:09:41 PM
7 comments
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