On purposeful ambiguity confusing the general public courtesy of True the Vote and its cohorts.

::::::::

On June 28, 2012, when the Supreme Court was deliberating over its final decision on the

 constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, activists thronged on its august outside steps awaiting the decision.

     In front of one rapt and enthusiastic group, a man was speaking through a bullhorn, opposing the ratification of the act. Another row of women wearing signature tee shirts, supporting them, specified their concern as anti-choice.

     Those in favor of ratification of the act were silent for the most part. I was told that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was broadcasting in one corner but did not see her. Progressives did not oppose brashness with brashness.

     When the decision was announced, a voice immediately responded, "Welcome to Cuba!" Cuba? What about Western Europe, which for the most part had similar, only better health-care programs for its people?

     We progressives were discreet in our joy as various suits came up to the Tea Party mike to speak in support of the opposition.

     "We do that usually," I thought about the Tea Party methods of expressing their opposition. They've coopted our methodology."

*****

Around 2009, the neo-nascent Tea Party took over many of the formerly Democratic or more moderate Republican seats in the House, now part of the majority. The Senate Democratic majority had lost some seats to less than sixty, so that blocking filibusters was no longer possible.

     The Tea Party had taken its name and raison d'etre from the origina [left-wing] rebels who had participated in the Boston Massacre and then the Tea Party. Taxation without representation? The new Tea Party controlled the House. Taxes too high? But they had been lowered in favor of the one percent.

     Where are the tyrannical King George and his cohorts? Weren't they voted out in 2008? The tyranny aspect is debatable; certainly NSA's grip over our private lives is tyrannical, but Obama strives in other ways to transcend the DINO etc. accusations hurled against him.

*****

In 2009 also, the Tea Party sprang an offshoot called True the Vote. It in turn was an offshoot of an already-extant "election integrity" oriented group that called itself the King Street Patriots. King Street, in eighteenth-century Boston, was the location of the Boston Massacre and the "routings of the Tea Party." Born in Harris County, Texas, the location of Houston, which was the second largest voting bloc in the state, the Patriots were concerned about the "staggering" shortage of poll workers, which invited fraud, among other concerns.

     The group vehemently favored the requirement of voter I.D., which sharply distinguishes them from the original Election Integrity (EI) movement. But we are also concerned about administrative issues at local levels throughout the country.  When groups like True the Vote and their offspring advocate for election integrity, the public, by way of Fox News and USA Today, among other mainstream media (MSM) vehicles, can easily become confused.

     Who stands for what anyway? The ambiguity is amplified when one considers the name of one of the original EI groups, Verified Voting, strong since 2003 when its founder David Dill organized thousands of fellow computer scientists to oppose electronic voting. These days this same organization still plays a major role in EI (an acronym not yet coopted by True the Vote and its offspring groups), circulating daily news to EI activists daily, an indispensable service.

     A newer group allied with True the Vote is named Verify the Vote.

     When the principles of the American Revolution are coopted by groups that advocate "carding" of all voters, one wonders. Voting was a sacred right, not a privilege, as declared by the populist Tom Paine and the aristocratic Tom Jefferson. True, this sacred right was reserved for propertied white males back then, but despite numerous roadblocks, the direction of EI's efforts is toward universal voting sans any vestige of Jim Crow, an emblem True the Vote and its followers could use far more accurately than its professed goal of "election integrity."

     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."

Authors Website: http://www.wordsunltd.com

Authors Bio:

Marta Steele is an author/editor/blogger who has been writing for Opednews.com since 2006. She is also author of the 2012 book "Grassroots, Geeks, Pros, and Pols: The Election Integrity Movement's Nonstop Battle to Win Back the People's Vote, 2000-2008" (Columbus, Free Press) and a member of the Election Integrity movement since 2001. Her original website, WordsUnLtd.com, first entered the blogosphere in 2003. She recently became a senior editor for Opednews.com. She has in the past taught college and worked as a full-time as well as freelance reporter. She has been a peace and election integrity activist since 1999. Her undergraduate and graduate educational background are in Spanish, classical philology, and historical and comparative linguistics. Her biography is most recently listed in "Who's Who in America" 2019 and in 2018 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who.