Overtures of "just trust us" doesn't cut it with the voters anymore. We know too much. While bloggers, those who read blogs, and citizen investigators know even more. However, you'll not read nor hear of their revelations and investigations in the mainstream media. No, that is for the corporate media to know and you to find out. Mainstream media sit up and pay attention! Your ratings are in the toilet because the public finds you no longer credible. While you weren't paying attention they've stopped watching. Growing numbers of us disgruntled voters have already tuned out the corporate media and have started leap-frogging over the heads of politicians, lobbyists, media, the entire military-industrial-media complex. We understand now that if you want the truth, you largely cannot rely on the mainstream media and you have to uncover it yourself. Have we citizens realized this in time, or has Homer Simpson taken over? Is democracy undone?
Our BOE's should be glass houses, not fortresses against oceans of angry voters:
Everyone seems to be talking about a paper trail but not too many are talking about transparency, especially our legislators. The Holt Bill, HR811, sadly does NOT provide transparency or a paper ballot. No, with HR811 what we get is the same old cheesey RTAL toilet paper trail that is nearly impossible to audit and offers no real security or transparency because the machine counts the vote no matter what the RTAL says. Yes, this is true. No, Holt is proving to be just another electronic game of smoke and mirrors. Holt institutionalizes the use of electronic voting machines as THE WAY America will conduct its elections in the future, while ignoring the dangers electronic voting poses to democracy. Holt is NOT a paper ballot bill as Brad Friedman of the bradblog has eloquently stated. Paper would be transparent. Election thieves do not WANT transparency. Therein lies the truth of the struggle for fair elections in America. It always comes back to transparency.
What I have learned when it comes to elections:
It is crucial to get it right on election night because it is a losing position to have to prove, after the fact, that election fraud has occurred. One never wants to have to go through an audit. Besides, just look how it upsets and offends elections officials who can't admit they flubbed the job and will do anything to cover up their malfeasance and incompetence?
I have also learned how fantastically expensive it is to buy and then to lay out a continuing stream of tax dollars for the upkeep on just one electronic voting machine. Just think of all that HAVA money elections officials would not get to funnel to partisan vendors and into their own pockets if we were to go back to hand counted paper ballots! What would happen if we were to spend our tax dollars, our HAVA money, conducting our elections on inexpensive, reliable paper? Why democracy might break out all over.
I have learned that every effort has been to make voting harder, not easier for the average American. I have learned that if elections can be stolen twenty-six ways to Sunday, they will be. No effort to defraud the voter is overlooked and no price is too high to maintain power and control over the functioning of our government which has turned into one colossal money-funneling operation. I have also learned that the concerted effort by politicians and other government officials, lobbyists, vendors, technicians, etc. to discourage voting by encouraging apathy, propagating ignorance, fear and inferior technology is at the heart their modus operandi. They want us to be discouraged from voting, not enfranchised! So people, this is all the more reason to vote. Voting is how we steer this floundering ship of state so we had better protect our right to vote and have that vote counted as cast.
Besides implementing publicly financed elections, I also conclude that the last thing election thieves want us to be doing is taking control of our precincts, and in the process, restoring transparency to our elections. They fear us getting to know our neighbors on election day to spend about four hours simply counting our own hand-marked paper ballots in front of everyone. They fear this more than anything. If this is the last thing they want us to be doing, and it is, I think this is precisely what we should be doing.
I will help count. It is a small personal commitment to make as a participant in democracy, if it means preserving my democracy. Elections belong to the People, not to elections officials, politicians, corporations or their lobbyists, political parties, technicians or anyone intending to use them as a stepping stone to higher office. It is time to wrest a significant amount of control away from federal and state elections officials and back into the hands of the people in our own precincts. The proper role of elections administration is to assist the people in the conduct of their own elections, and that is all. It is time to take back our elections on hand counted paper ballots. Better for you. Better for me. Better for the Republic. Better for the preservation of democracy.
As the rats jump the sinking ship of state and the cockroaches scatter when the lights go on, it will ultimately be the court of public opinion which decides who owns our democracy. It always is. Greedy partisans never learn this. Once again, it is We the People, the victims and witnesses to the crime, who must defend ourselves from those who would undermine our freedom. The time has come to protect ourselves from schemes carried out by our own government. Professing to be a self-governing people is not sufficient to defend democracy. We have to act like we own it. We must act as the self-governed, and act now. We need to get big money out of our local elections. We must demand publicly financed campaigns and elections conducted on hand-counted paper ballots.
see:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4447
http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=4418
http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=223&paged=3
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/64/22372
