New York-- The Buck Stops Here: Reflections on the Rule or Law and our Election System

The ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone – James Madison

We used to enjoy saying that the United States is governed by the rule of law, not men. It has become difficult to make that statement in the last 6 years- just about the same time that most Americans have been forced, by the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), to vote on these machines. All the more reason to step up our collective responsibility to strive towards our ideals and resist those who would deprive us of our inalienable right to be a free, self-governing people. As long as we are able, each citizen privileged to live in a country founded on the fundamental right of a democracy – government by the people, of the people, and for the people -- has the duty to fight to preserve that democracy.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

Our vote is the means by which we exercise that consent. It should go without saying that since elections are our mechanism for asserting our authority over our public servants - the government, the people are the only ones who should have authority over their own elections. Once we permit our public servants to decide that someone other than the people shall control the counting of our votes, as they have under HAVA, We the People can no longer ensure the integrity of our votes. As has been often quoted these days, but not often enough:

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. – Thomas Paine

Every citizen has the responsibility to every other citizen to protect the integrity of the ballot. Each of us must strive to insure that all citizens are entitled to vote and that every vote is counted as cast. This is our civic duty. It is the ultimate obligation the individual assumes as the price of freedom in a democracy. This charge is oft repeated, but not heeded. If citizens assumed this responsibility the government would not have been able to undermine the will of the people. They can only do this so long as we stay collectively silent, as evidenced by how much power and control the government has taken from us right now.

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. –Thomas Jefferson

HAVA has caused every state, except New York, to allow these corruptible and vulnerable machines to run their elections. The Legislature, whether well intentioned at the time or not, has proscribed the exercise of the most fundamental of our constitutional rights- "the primary right by which other rights are protected" – the ability of the People to observe and retain control over the counting of our votes.

When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all. – William O. Douglas, Justice of the Supreme Court, 1939 - 1975

Citizens across the country need to take back their elections: remove the corporate dominion that voting machines have given to private corporations. HAVA has not yet prohibited our right to choose to not have a computer count our votes. Under HAVA we must provide for disability access, but that does not mean we have to choose these computerized machines to count our votes. Since we already know that there is no such thing as tamper-proof software why would we, as citizens who cherish freedom, agree to submit the counting of our vote to the hidden corruptible workings of a computer?

The people are masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it! -- Abraham Lincoln

The country has been under fierce attack from within and we have not been defended. We have watched our inalienable rights crushed by this administration. We have witnessed the wholesale dismantling of government in service to the people – replaced by cronies and hacks who will lie and conceal to implement the rule of this corrupt administration. It's not easy to resist the force that's quite literally stolen the reigns of control from us. But to submit is not an option.

Americans can choose to take the DREs and Optical Scanners, that were bought without their consent, and dump them in the Boston Harbor. We in New York don't need to go so far. We can learn from the mistakes of our unfortunate neighbors and save our money. All those hard earned tax dollars being spent not just on the shoddy equipment, the maintenance and upgrading, the contracts with the voting machine vendors to run the elections because no one can operate these machines without them, but the millions handed over to the so-called independent testing companies that allegedly "certify" these machines, when we know that no such certification is done or is possible. (See Halting Holt Thoughts and Nancy Tobi's and Bev Harris's Voting Machines as a Ponzi Scheme).

The emperor has no clothes: the sham testing and certification of these voting machines is a fraud against the American people. There is no testing and certification that could make these machines secure, even if this government were to require more than the appearance of testing and approval that it does now. The administration would have us believe the machines are certified and can be relied on to protect our votes, but this is an administration that has no interest in protecting our votes.

They have used the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to ensure that hundreds of thousands of us will never vote. You only want to rig so much to prevent detection (see Landslide Denied). This administration is so unpopular, rigging the machines alone can't do it. It needs more. It has used the DOJ to do its bidding, aggressively pursuing phantom voter fraud in order to create a justification for voter ID laws that will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and minority voters who tend to vote Democrat. This campaign to retain power at all costs was also behind the firing of at least 4 of the 8 U.S. attorneys who failed to go along with the Administration's treasonous plan. See here. Still another aspect of this annihilate-the people's-destroy-all-checks-and-balances government, is the recent altered report from the EAC which concealed the actual evidence that voter fraud was "scant" (evidence from a report done at tax payers' expense) and stated instead that "There is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud." See here.

We in New York, who have held off the DOJ breathing down our necks (NY was sued by the DOJ for not yet complying with HAVA) still have the opportunity to be a beacon to others. The buck can stop here.

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