Democracy is a work in progress, as scholars will affirm. Governments at all levels fluctuate in the levels its principles are perpetuated. But they all lay claim to these principles as motivations. That is a start of something great and an end sometimes achieved.
Democracy entails hard and continuous work. It embraces disparate points of view. The principles of the American Revolution belong to all of us. But they must be applied rigorously and accurately and evolve to the dictates of the times in order to survive.
A public victimized by an undemocratic economy has little time to worry about election integrity. When groups work to confuse them during the small pockets of time they steal to attempt to connect with higher levels of reality than subsistence, the opposite of education occurs: deception and ambiguity. John Adams asserted that an educated public is an important ingredient in a successful democracy.
EI must work hard to dissociate itself from its evil shadow. Strong advocacy of hand counting paper ballots as the only true way to measure the will of the people is one way to achieve this. It flies in the face of those advocating Internet voting, and this emerging battle between the "present" and the past may rise as a prominent concern of the MSM. It took ten years for the voter I.D. controversy to receive its attention.
I never thought I'd emerge on the conservative side of anything, but I am proud to advocate HCPB which, when proper methodologies we have worked out are activated, can provide the same instant gratification that electronic voting does, though it may involve less fun. (But consider the celebratory, folksy ambience of some of the old-fashioned HCPB events on election days in New Hampshire, for instance.)
On a final note, lest my main point about the dangers of an evil shadow confounding the public hopelessly be lost, I offer this recollection from a story published by Rawstory in 2006:
"In a speech to the Republican National Lawyers Association, . . Karl Rove [said to his colleagues] . . .: "I want to thank you for your work on clean elections [italics mine]. I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002 election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.'"
It may have been in this same speech that he observed that "Elections have become tainted by liberal fraud; America's beginning to have elections that are run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses."
Some of the information for this article comes from my forthcoming book whose working title is "Ballots or Bill$: The Future of Democracy."
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