OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: The DIY Ballot

The problem for them is that by now the monster will have awoken. The news of this revolution will have already reached everyone, into the furthest corners and farthest reaches of America. Everyone with a TV or radio will know of it. Even the laziest, most self-centered boob in the country will know that his neighbors have started something important, and he will not want to be left out. This is such a no-brainer that it will not be ignored. How hard is it to write a name on a piece of paper and walk down to the polling place? It isn’t like storming the Bastille or wading raging rivers with George Washington or spending weeks in jail or something.

So if the precincts refuse the votes of millions of people, millions more people are going to be very mad. They are going to draw the line and say, “This is enough! This is the simple call to action. This is something even I can do!” And they are going to join the first people in an easy little local march. This second time it is even easier than voting, since you don’t have to stand in line. All you have to do is show up with your piece of paper, wave it in the air, and be counted (by helicopters and blimps, probably). All you have to do is join the party. Everyone will be there, your boss, your kids, and possibly your dogs. If 5 million demanded their vote be counted the first time, this time you will have 50 million, or maybe 200 million. No amount of police or talking heads or stonewalling is going to make any difference at that point. The military can’t attack 200 million of its own people. The government will have no choice but to make law what you have demanded. That is, all legible votes on paper of a reasonable size will be accepted and counted. If more human counters have to be hired, they will be hired. If we can spend trillions of dollars on defense, we can hire a few more people to count the votes. If WE THE PEOPLE could count the votes by hand in 1870 or 1970, WE THE PEOPLE can do it now.

This is not difficult. It is also not hard to imagine. You can see it happening, without a vivid imagination or any effort at all. It does not require much idealism, or even a terribly high opinion of your neighbor. This is something that can happen, with people as they are. It doesn’t require weeks of riots, violence, massive protests, lots of screaming, or books of opinion and invective. It takes one day, maybe two. If you were going to vote anyway, it does not require you to do anything you weren’t already going to do. Except to carry one extra piece of paper with you, as your very own ballot.

So be a hero. Dig out your favorite pen. For some of you it will be a quill pen, and you will dip into some fancy ink and scrawl your vote like John Hancock. For others it will be a Technicolor pen, topped by a troll doll, and you will print your vote in big block letters, sticking out your tongue the while. But however you do it, DO IT! What we want is the largest write-in vote in history. Not a write-in for some particular candidate. A write-in for any candidate is what we want. Even if you plan to vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate, do it as a write-in. Join the party! Not the political party, but the party of WE THE PEOPLE. The long-term goal here is not electing any particular person, it is cleaning up the voting process, in one quick pass. Everyone can get involved with that, Republican, Democrat, and Other.

For those who don’t want to vote for one of the two main candidates, this should be smashingly easy. But those who plan to vote the party line will say, “I can’t do that! I have to be sure my vote is counted. I can’t risk having my vote discarded. That would be handing the election to the other party.” But what these people should realize--what they should have learned from the past two general elections and the primaries this year--is that their votes already don’t count. No ones votes are being counted. The POWERS-THAT-BE have already decided who is going to win and by how much, in every part of every state. If your candidate wins, it will not be because you voted for him or her. It will be because you have the fortune this time to desire what you are supposed to desire. It will be because you just happened to vote for the anointed one. Given the current scheme, if you voted the other way, or forgot to vote, or voted a thousand times, it would not matter. The machines know who is going to win before the voting even starts.

If you really want your vote for Clinton or McCain to be counted, you should join our write-in party. Then, at the end, you will really know the truth. If McCain wins among write-ins, for instance, you and everyone else will know that he won because he got the most votes. Isn’t that how it should be?

Here is another benefit. This first time, counting all these write-ins will not be fast. People to count and people to witness will have to be found or hired (or, preferably, drawn by lot). There may be a bit of confusion. But this will teach us patience. We don’t require a fast vote count, we require a correct and transparent vote count, and this will finally drive that point home. WE THE PEOPLE don’t require and have never required that we know the outcome by midnight, or by the next morning, or even by the following day. We do not need exit polls to tell us the outcome before California has even voted. We do not need Dan Rather to call the election by 8pm. We do not need Fox News to pour over computer models in order to call the election before CBS. What we require is a vote total we can trust. We can trust our own ballots, written with our own favorite pens, since in any recount we can recognize our own stationary and say to ourselves, “There, self, is my own private contribution to the future!”

This one act, if done in unison, will change America forever. In 2012, we won’t see the early whittling down of candidates we saw this year. We won’t see the manipulation of the press and of the polls and of the machines, since all that will be over. Your choice as a voter will never be limited, down to the last moment, and everyone will know that. Candidates won’t have to bow out. They won’t have to collect signatures, they won’t have to go to conventions. They can tell super-delegates to take a hike. You won’t care if your candidate is polling at 50% or 5%, all you will care about is that he or she is your candidate. You will never lose him or her to some limited ballot. There will be no lesser of two evils: you can choose your own evil. Plus, we will finally know, with no margin of error, exactly how popular Mickey Mouse is compared to, say, John McCain.

Yes, this is truly a simple solution to a problem that has begun to look gigantic. We have “Take you daughter to work Day.” Why not, “Take your ballot to vote Day”? It solves the problem of write-ins. It solves the problem of the machines, since the machines will be useless in counting these ballots. We don’t have to go in and smash the machines, like the Luddites did in their time. We don’t have to risk arrest. All we have to do is take our own ballots in.

The most uptight at the precincts will say, “We can’t do this, because the ballots won’t stack up right. Different sized pieces of paper will be harder to shuffle and manage. Besides, each race won’t be in the same place on each ballot. This is not just a vote for President. If people don’t list the races in the same order, it will take much longer to count the votes.”

And I say, “You should have thought of that before you forced us to this remedy. In the future, once we have solved all these greater problems, WE THE PEOPLE may once again decide to accept a standardized ballot, if it is one we can trust, one we can write on, one with a place for write-ins, one that is counted by hand and not a machine. For now, you will just have to deal with these inconveniences. Besides, as I said already, WE THE PEOPLE don’t care how long it takes to count the votes. We just want to be sure they are counted, even if it takes a month. If you need help counting these homemade ballots, just ask for help and WE THE PEOPLE will help you count them. We will choose those we can trust from among us and send them to you to help you count. It is not such a big problem. Counting votes by hand is a small problem. Massive fraud and disenfranchisement is a big problem. If you dopey precinct people can’t tell the difference between a big problem and a little problem, well, WE THE PEOPLE can.

In fact, none of these current precinct people should be trusted. None of them were chosen by WE THE PEOPLE. They have had no problem letting the machines in, and the secrecy, and the fraud. We may assume that they are either dishonest or incompetent. Every last one of them should be dismissed. Their names should be put on a list and they should never have anything to do with counting votes again. Each precinct should vote for its own vote counters, and these people should be chosen based only on their honesty. All vote counters should be monitored and doubled. Every count should be as rigorous as the recount in Florida in 2000, or moreso. The vote counting room of every precinct should be the most watched and monitored room in town, like a bank vault or a high security prison. How can we spend so much time and money assuring and insuring these other things, and spend almost no time and money assuring the vote? Nothing in our society is more illogical than that. And you can be sure it is no accident. But it would be very easy for WE THE PEOPLE to correct it. My universal write-in ballot is the first and easiest step to correcting it.

I know this is getting a little long, but I want to say one last thing about organizing this. I really believe we are going to do it, so let us talk brass tacks. It is not hard to carry a pen and a piece of paper to the poll, or to write names on it. The only hard part is facing these precinct workers by yourself. Some few of us enjoy confronting false authority, but most people don’t, and that’s a fact. Even if 5 or 50 million people do this on voting day, each individual voter won’t know that until after the fact, since the country is so spread-out. No, we will each of us go to the polling place before or after work, or at lunch, and we may not know who came before us, and what they said or did.

But solving this is easy, too, with a bit of foresight. We just need a handful of people at each precinct to stay there the whole day, to act as a sort of pep-squad. They will also collect all the ballots that the precinct will not take, or to pre-count all the homemade ballots that the precinct does take (to be sure they aren’t thrown out or undercounted). This pep-squad will act as back-up and witness in any squabbles with precinct workers, and it will act as press liaison, telling the local news what is happening and keeping them up-to-date on totals. In small precincts, this pep-squad could be comprised of a single brave individual. This pep-squad should have a video camera, and know how to use it.

That said, what is going to make this event an event is the large numbers of people who join it. The local news needs to see groups of people working together, and presenting their demands together. Therefore, a voting-day turnout that is spread evenly across the whole day is not going to be as photogenic as one that is co-ordinated to arrive together. For this reason, some planning needs to take place, to encourage people to flock. If they all came at lunchtime, for instance, that would be great. The local news (TV and newspapers) could be warned of it beforehand, and the event could be maximized. But it will probably be more convenient to have three such flocks, one before work (when the polls open), one at lunch (12 noon) and one after work (right before the polls close). This will give voters more reasonable choices, and will allow for a building of momentum throughout the day. For instance, the local news may not believe that such an event will really unfold, even if they are warned of it. But if the first shift starts the ball rolling, and the noon shift builds on it, the local news is sure to show up for the third shift. By then it will have hit the web and the word will be all over the country. The first and second shifts can even come back after work and add some body heat to their votes in the box, to hatch them properly. That would be great.

The other thing that will give people confidence going in is the knowledge that the idea is already popular. The idea of the DIY ballot will have to be a nationwide hit well before election day. It will have to have huge buzz going in, or no one will trust that it will actually happen. Fortunately, we have 8 months to work with. The internet already blasts trivialities into the stratosphere almost overnight. A good idea can travel around the world in a matter of days. So I have no doubt this can get done.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4