When asked my Ms. Gould about the near term future of Pennsylvania Professor Lopresti was less than enthusiastic, “Pennsylvania is in a very vulnerable position”. His final shared statement was that, “most studies show that paper ballots is a more secure way to go”. Let me guess, those studies that did not endorse paper ballots were underwritten by Diebold?
Following Professor Lopresti was Ohio voting integrity champions Paddy Shaffer, Director of the Ohio Election Justice Campaign and her compatriot fellow activist Marian Lupo. Having been on my broadcast not an hour earlier, Shaffer and Lupo were in a conversational radio mode when they spoke of how they viewed Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s responses to Mary Ann’s questions.
While they seemed encouraged and hopeful that Secretary Brunner will permit Ohio citizens to “monitor the count”, there was also a sense of powerlessness. This is because that they have requested meetings with Secretary Brunner since August of 2007 and have yet to been granted an audience. Paddy said, “to our great frustration this meeting has not happened”. The discussion moved on, and Marian Lupo said that “citizens need to have their own hearings on this”. Yes Marian, they do. Lets hope that any findings from a hearing will be LISTENED to by those elected officials that seem to suffer from selective deafness.
Most revealing was when Mary Ann asked John if he felt it was too late for 2008? John does “not envision changes for 2008”, but when pressed by Mary Ann about whether it was too late if enough people forced the issue, then John openly agreed that “anything can be accomplished if enough people get behind it”. He then followed with, “but to some extent people have gotten a little bit lazy since the Viet Nam era”. His sense of doom is shared by many casual observers. He said that he was asked recently by a reporter, “what do you see for 2012”?
Doing a post mortem of the broadcast is like opening up a shooting victim with eleven gun shot wounds in order to determine the cause of death. The reality of the voting integrity movement is that we are up against a political machine that is hell bent on having electronic voting technologies at the polls.
I want to remind everyone that these are the good old days. We are clearly doing battle against the forces of professional politicians and money driven businesses that have only one goal, climb the career ladder as easily as possible, and create corporate profits. Voting integrity is not a consideration with them.
Voting integrity is not easy. It is the hard work of the front line soldier. Activists walk point in a senseless war against democracies substrate. To those tireless front line warriors, my hat comes off.
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