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Voting closes at midnight on 12/31 at Obama's change.org website. Here are two HCPB "ideas" that need a million votes. Okay, 10,000 would be enough. Okay, 3,000 would be enough.
RosieHCPB
Taking up President Elect Barack Obama's promise to listen to the people, some friends posted "ideas" at the change.org website. I'd like you to vote for both of them:
John Ervin's: Hand Count Paper Ballots Now reads:
The most single urgent issue confronting this country, preceding in importance all others, simply because it presupposes all other change in government, is emergent need for the return to observable voting process; and the only way to do that securely, and with voter confidence worthy of the name, is through the casting and counting of hard copy (i.e., paper) ballots, and posted at the precinct level, so as to secure the chain of custody for citizens.
We have seen our democracy hijacked, de facto, by privatized voting interests, counting our votes in secret, an event that is absolute anathema to any believer in democracy, and prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, which mandates that one person shall cast a vote. Not a machine. The only way to return citizen confidence to voting, crucial to a credible and legitimate democracy, is to cast observable, palpable, ballots without the mediation of machines (or private voting criminals, ah, companies) and to have those ballots counted by fellow citizens as may be drafted at random, such as we do juries.
If we do not resolve these chain of custody issues, we will not be secure in the results of our elections, nor even know who it is that controls and calculates them. We the People...must know; or change will be stillborn, void, and meaningless.
Vickie Karp's Citizen Run Elections reads:
Ditto to Tom Courbat's post. After five years of working on election integrity issues and co-editing a book entitled "HACKED! High Tech Election Theft in America", http://www.hackedelections.com ), evidence proves that touch screens AND optical scan counters can both be easily hacked to flip elections without detection. As Ion Sancho, Leon County Florida's highly respected Election Administrator said after witnessing the Black Box Voting/Harri Hursti hack of his Diebold optical scan counters, "I would've certified these election results without hesitation." (See the hack in the 2007 Emmy-award nominated HBO documentary, "Hacking Democracy" So elections which truly should be challenged can be hacked to make them seem like they really weren't that close!
Control of elections must be taken back from corporations, whose procedures right now and for the last several election cycles equate to secret vote counting (with secret software and non-transparent procedures -AND brought back into the hands of citizens through hand-counted paper ballot elections - WITH enhanced security procedures such as video cameras on the ballot box - WITH citizens monitoring all day - WITH ballot boxes never leaving the table until 7pm when the box seals are broken and multi-partisan teams of citizens count all the votes until they all agree on the totals...AND TOTALS are posted, as Tom said, AT THE PRECINCT LEVEL. In this way, ballot boxes are extremely difficult if not impossible to stuff; ballot boxes may end up in the river or in the trunk of someone's car, but only after all the votes are counted. If any other computerized counting device is used as a second count, the hand count MUST be the "count of record" or the real results can easily be subverted.
Let's learn from Black Box Voting and Ion Sancho---optical scanners are easy to hack! And let's go straight to the only transparent and citizen-controlled solution there is: Hand-counted paper ballot elections, with enhanced security procedures.
I don't have Tom Courbat's link, but will post it if I get it. Meanwhile, these initiative ideas need a couple thousand votes to even make it to the "next round" on Obama's platform.
Dare we bother? Why not? What can it hurt? You do have to register at the site in order to vote.
