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Can we work "within the system"? A response to those who think we can.
By Michael Collins (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Michael Collins - Writer
Michael Collins
Election Fraud News
Is it practical or useful to attempt to work within the current legislative system to change election processes and regulations? This is a critical issue for elections activists. This statement is my firmly held position. I do not intend to offend anyone. Rather, my goal is to focus on the abundantly clear realities we face and the directions we must take based on those realities.
On the issue that interests me the most, election fraud, we clearly need to work within the system to gather that data sufficient to determine if election fraud occurred in a given election. We have no ability to critique and judge the system if we lack access to the available data. This working within approach has been highly effective as evidenced by the work of TruthIsAll, Simon, Freeman, and ElectionArchive.Org/Baiman.
With regard to the other focus of the clean elections interest group, influencing the type of voting and tabulation systems in use, the legislative regulation of those systems, and the quality assurance component, post election audits, the choice is not as straight forward.
The legislation that established our current nightmare, the Help America Vote Act, was a bipartisan effort. It received overwhelming approval in the House and Senate. The record of the final action should have warned us. Convicted felon, Rep. Robert Ney, R, OH is listed as the principal sponsor.
Ney principal sponsor.
That legislation claimed to solve the problems of Florida 2000. It did nothing of the sort. The problems of Florida, a stolen election if there ever was one, had little to do with hanging chads here and there and voters struggling with a deceptive butterfly ballot. The problems of Florida were the 50,000 or more black Floridians taken off the voting rolls by felon purge software (who were unable to vote in Election 2000) and the more than 170,000 spoiled ballots which occurred mostly in minority dominated precincts in Republican controlled counties with significant black population. This is all well documented.
Truth #1: The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was born of a bipartisan lie, one that ignored the theft and all the very public evidence of that theft. A likely suspect, the voting machines, was framed with full knowledge that those problems were secondary to race-based strategies that resulted in Al Gore losing tens of thousands of votes. .
As HAVA was implemented, we began to see questionable election after questionable election.
At the same time, groups falsely assumed to be of the left began to lobby for HAVA.
Those concerned with election fraud were marginalized as spread sheet wielding conspiracy theorists and a new focus emerged taking the name election integrity.
The bits and bytes, machine based effort focused intensively on this or that type of electronic voting device (although little was done about tabulators). Paper trails were touted as a solution, e.g., voter verified paper ballots. As it became painfully obvious that touch screen paper trails were meaningless, a shift occurred. Optical scan readers and the paper ballots fed through them were suddenly touted as the solution that would provide integrity to our elections.
Never mind the fact that there were obviously people behind all those close Republican wins, again and again. The perpetrators were cast aside and, in a modern version of animism for all but a few; the machines acquired the ability to systematically produce questionable results in a questionable way without any reference to human involvement. . The apotheosis of this fallacy is seen in the central argument in Jennings election contest argument that voting machines in Florida's 13th Congressional race consistently favored the Republican candidate due to machine malfunction. Apparently those machines have a mind of their own.
Truth# 2: Neutralizing concerns about election fraud in favor of election integrity ignore the obvious: election fraud is the primary reason to be concerned about election integrity in the first place. Marginalized concern about election fraud was accompanied in a shift of focus to monitoring and altering voting machines, software, and technical methods to improve elections. Crime scene evidence is gathered every election cycle and then used to convict inanimate objects. Who benefits? The machines?
We are now two huge steps away from Florida 2000 (which many will agree has repeated itself over and over in different localities). The real causes of Florida 2000 were ignored, spurious causes assigned, and we were blessed with HAVA. In the process, the focus on election outcomes was neutralized and sanitized as though it was really all about machine and software malfunction.
Is it practical or useful to we work within the system? Can we achieve reliable and believable elections within this system?
Legislative behavior and action provide the evidence to answer this question.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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