Steven Rosenfeld said:

The voter suppression and fraudulent vote count tactics only work in close elections where the other side tries to shave a few percentage points off the vote here and there.

That is not true. If the undetectably mutable software in the central tabulators is programmed to alter the vote, it doesn't matter how many people vote or how close the race is. If 100% of eligible voters cast ballots, none of those ballots are discarded, every single one of those voters casts their ballot for candidate X, and the central tabulator allocates 53% of the vote to candidate Y and only 45% to candidate X, candidate Y "wins" and can be sworn into office, and the proof that the election was stolen will be fodder for many new books while candidate Y spends years in office.

Steven Rosenfeld:

Voters need to know what they can and cannot control....You cannot control how well election machinery works or whether there will be a problem with the vote count.

That's right. In a citizen-owned transparent participatory democracy there would be free, fair, honest, open elections, and you COULD control whether or not your vote is counted and counted accurately. To continue to vote in elections that private vendors, their programmers, and corrupt elections officials, rather than citizens, control, is to grovel to tyranny instead of standing up for democracy.

Joan wrote:

This quote reminded me of AA's official prayer:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.

We CAN change our electoral system. 

We can change it by saying, "We demand honest elections and we won't vote until we get them. We will not risk democracy on a gamble that our votes might be counted."

We WON'T change anything by saying,  "We demand honest elections, and until we get them we will make every effort to continue to vote in rigged elections and to continue to collect evidence that these elections are continuing to be stolen."

Consensual Political Intercourse

If you know that you cannot control something, for example that you cannot control  the fact that you get beaten up every time you go into a particularly infamous bar in a bad part of town, you might get my sympathy the first time you do it, and maybe even the second time, but if you know you can't control it and you keep going back there anyway, take your sob stories to somebody else.

To say that you are going to make sure that you have proper I.D., enough money to pay for your drinks, witnesses to film it when you get beaten up again (you already have a collection of those films), and then you keep going back to that bar, even though you've been beaten up there several times before and you should know better, tells me that you're stupid.  

Which wouldn't bother me if it was only your own dumb butt that was going to get whipped, but elections involve our entire system of government and the future of our country. Go back to the bar if you want, but please don't try to take me and my neighbors with you. We've been there before, we've gotten our butts whipped several times, and we're not going there again. You can call us cowards, but we think we have more common sense than you do.

In South Africa and in Zimbabwe, election boycotts were effective. They took away any shred of credibility that the Apartheid and the Mugabe regimes might have had. Unless you want four more years of continuing crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both presidential candidates are committed to, there is nothing for you to vote for even if your vote was counted. 

Boycott the war. Don't vote. 

by Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments) on Friday, Jul 11, 2008 at 8:26:46 PM

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Joan,

This book SO needed to be written, but what about those lacking the time to read the book or who are not best served by this medium? How can we reach them in time? The clock is running, days already getting shorter . . .

Thanks for the review!

Marta

by Marta Steele (44 articles, 0 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 48 comments) on Friday, Jul 11, 2008 at 10:05:41 PM

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But even if they do, there's no way you'll ever know if it was counted for the candidate you voted for.

Even if the election observers are able to gather the evidence to allow the researchers to prove that 20% of the votes in your precinct were flipped from the Democrat to the Republican by the central tabulators, you'll never know if your vote was one of them or not.

Of course that won't bother you. All you want is to be able to vote, like the people in my opednews poll a while back who proudly stated that they would continue to vote even if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet.

We have the government that we have, because we have the citizens we have. Until people learn that unless their vote is counted and counted accurately, it isn't a real vote, just a sham that they've been suckered into, there won't be any change.

by Mark E. Smith (21 articles, 30 quicklinks, 100 diaries, 1325 comments) on Saturday, Jul 12, 2008 at 12:45:43 AM

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You must agree with Rosenfeld that the process has been made more complex in that great tradition of Republican ingenuity and an effort to provide us with four more years of catastrophe. I can't even convince myself that the slim Democratic gains in Congress weren't a concession by those connivers to convince us all that the voting system works.

And besides that, dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. So intellectually your remarks are most welcome. But where's the next step? Bush is our fault? I've said the same thing, but what can we do to change it? I"d love to know.

I don't mean to use Joan's review as a forum for dissent. But you can't just diss. Tell us what to do.

Marta

by Marta Steele (44 articles, 0 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 48 comments) on Saturday, Jul 12, 2008 at 6:19:41 AM

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Having your vote counted as you intended it is not guaranteed simply by registering. What kind of nonsense is that? How many properly registered voters were denied the opportunity to even place their finger on the touch-screen ballot because of a variety of man-created problems such as not sufficient numbers of machines available, thus creating long lines and long wait times whereby people simply said, the H*** with it”? How about those who were disenfranchised by computers who spit their names out as “felons”, (that is irony, felons were not permitted to vote yet felons are allowed to work in governmental position within our government), and a host of other tactics employed to actually keep segments of our population from casting a vote, even though they were legitimately registered.

Why would registering as a Republican or Democrat or Fascist for that matter have any bearing on anything other than to give the computer programmers an idea of how to “fix” their programs? Once at the polls, should something in the above paragraph keep one away, one can vote any way they wish. You touch the screen for the candidate of your choice, leaving the booth, and hand your results to a poll sitter.

Your vote has now been cast and you may be actually given a receipt to prove you voted and who you voted for. You are now content, leave the polling place feeling upbeat and very patriotic.

Outside the polling place you are approached by an opinion poll surveyor and you tell him/her who you voted for. Later you see that your candidate leads in that poll and you really feel upbeat.

But the real work has just begun. The software will now count the vote, without regard as to how you intended. Indeed, your vote was actually counted before you touched the screen!

That evening, after the polls have closed the news programs inform you that your candidate leads in the exit polls through the nation and you go to bed feeling extremely upbeat.

The next morning, however, your emotions are trashed as you discover that the results, obtained in the wee hours of the morning, show the opponent making a remarkable recovery, denouncing all of the exit polls. There is, of course, little said concerning the “abnormalities” in some of the vote counts, such as the winner receiving twice the number of votes in a given area as there were registered voters, or another candidate actually receiving – 16,000 (yup, that's a negative) votes in another (this actually happened in the 2000 election in Florida as Gore received negative votes. It was, of course adjusted, but how, if the software wasn't rigged, could negative votes be tallied in the first place?), and many other horror stories can be listed here.

How to correct this? Are paper and pencil ballots and hand counting the answer? This would be far better than the existing charade, but still leaves room for dishonesty. Remember, the “terror threat” in Warren County Ohio when the ballots were removed to a “secure place” and counted, yielding a much larger margin of victory for Bush than was expected? So, hand counting stills leaves that shadow, although it also leaves a paper trail, unless.... something happens to the paper. How many of the ballots from 2004 have been destroyed? No paper trail there.

Another, yet looked at method might be the answer. It is a system called seeVote! This system goes as follows:

The voter touches the screen for the candidates of their choice. The program prints out three indentical ballots indicating their choices. The voter then gives the poll sitter 2 of the ballots, who puts one in the “official” box and then other in the “Verify” box. The voter takes the third ballot with them as their proof of their vote.

Outside the polling place the voter may, or may not be approached by the exit poll surveyor and goes homes feeling upbeat and patriotic.

The computer now does its thing by first counting the ballots in the “Official” box. Once this has been completed another machine now counts the ballots in the “Verify” box. The two should be exactly the same. If they are not a hand count is performed.

Meanwhile, the voter goes home and the news programs tell him/her their candidate appears to have won. A good night's sleep is in store.

The next morning the voter gets on the internet to further verify that their vote was in fact counted as they had intended. They are also able to view all of the votes that were cast in their precinct, but not having any idea of the identity of any of them, except their own. This second verification is an important one in that it gives assurance to the voter that they were in fact heard, and listened to.

For more information on seeVote see http://www.seeVote.com

by Dennis Kaiser (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 35 diaries, 730 comments [137 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Jul 12, 2008 at 9:16:14 AM

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The book was written to show how complicated it is to register these days, so we'd better start now. You have jumped to how to vote to assure a fair outcome, but first you have to register, right?

The proposed system seems good, but first you have to register before you can vote.

Then, however the vote is counted etc. you have to hope that honesty was the main protagonist. If not, there must be some version of a recount, and you know what hell that is.

Many thanks for describing a new system!

Cen.

by Marta Steele (44 articles, 0 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 48 comments) on Saturday, Jul 12, 2008 at 5:37:36 PM

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