Did You Elect Your Voting Machine?
"Its not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting"
Alfred Emanuel Smith
"I have seen these systems connected to phone lines dozens of times with users gaining remote access," said DIEB-THROAT. "What I think we have here is a very serious problem. Remote access using phone lines eliminates any need for a conspiracy of hundreds to alter the outcome of an election... Remote access using this backdoor means that one malicious person can change the outcome of any Diebold election."
BradBlog, A Diebold Insider Speaks!
Once again, while we are distracted by the candidates and issues, the seminal topic of our ballots and voting machines has been buried by the corporate media... as if this issue is somehow settled.
The basic question here is have we elected our own voting machines or paper ballot processess? Did you vote for Diebold or ESS? Who gave us a choice? Who will give us a choice? And why the rush to destroy verifiable, recountable, paper balllot voting?
Did your city fathers or local representatives ask you how you wanted to vote, whether paper or machine? Or, did they simply accept a top-down mandate from on-high, and not have the democratic decency to demand a local plebiscite, the balls to sue in your interests or even complain one iota, and so simply push the black hole process upon their constituents like good little boot lickers?
This was the case in my own city, where no council member bothered to force the issue or inquire of the people how they wanted to vote in their "democracy" on the vital matter of machine or paper ballots. The local lemmings here ignored the citizenry and simply accepted the top-down mandate from a county board - where a 2-1 majority vote can sway the day for a Diebold.
As a result we now vote on a black-box machine without even a name on it! There is no indication of the manufacturer or software maker, and even the poll workers did not know who makes or services the machine. Talk about a black hole.
God forbid the voters should even know the name of the maker of the machine recording their digital vote.
Buying or corrupting one county board vote is too easy and, as a result, the whole system is then rigged for whatever machine vendor and system successfully supplants the voters right to a verifiable paper ballot process. There was no democracy in the process in our burg. Yours?
When our own local representatives fail to put this first order issue to a ballot measure – at the city or county level - they are guilty of a high crime. When they fail to go to court and challenge a top-down dictate on this most fundamental issue of democracy, then they need to be recalled, impeached and shamed.
We must realize that machine voting corruption is the one new way, and the last fail-safe way, that ruling elites have to subvert democracy and maintain their oligarchy. If assassinations fail and corporate control of media and polls do not do the trick, and those nasty "populists" continue to gain favor, then there is only one way to retain power and control over the many and that is with privately owned and controlled voting machines – in short, a new counting control process made in heaven for fascists and dictators around the world.
So now, along with their corporate control of the media, the central bank, and the "Free trade" regime, they have completed the coup and added voting machines and election processes. You’re dreaming if you think you live in any kind of effective democracy today. What we have is what they’ve long been after – a "managed" democracy. Indeed, they now manage every aspect of "our" lives in this golden age of neo-slavery... wherein every important decision is removed from the people, and our representatives are either too dumb, scared, or bought off to do anything about it and, worse, we lack a national initiative process to regain power over our own country and future.
All of this is to say we need to recover our paper-ballot voting systems in order to have voting integrity, honesty, believable democracy, and we need our own representatives to give us the choice in this most important matter. Democracy can only come into being and proceed from the ground up, and so derive its authority from the most basic unit of society – the city. How did your city choose its voting processes... or did they?
Kent Welton
