Bottom line: machines have got to go.There is simply no way ever to make peace with this Trojan Horse at our gates, let alone continue to give it free entry in and out of our society, in fact, any of our global societies. We need once and for all to abolish all vote-counting and tabulating and vote-casting machines, in all their sordid combinations, and world-wide.

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Bottom line: machines have got to go. I've been concerned for some years, now, that even some of the best people in our movement think that there is some way or other, however convoluted ~and therefore somehow apparently more reasonable in the convolutions~ that we can dally and dither with the issue of machines. My interest so far in holding off judging "Request by Voters," and other lesser initiatives undertaken by many with the expressed intent of laying the "groundwork" for paper ballots, was simply to study it, them, and see what was good about them, if only to try to sever those ideas from the whole ( that, as a whole, might not be so good ). As they say in most binding contracts, "if any part of this is unenforceable, it shall not affect any other provision." Well: machinery is one part that anyone in her/his right mind should adjudge "unenforceable," if it's just only so much a matter of our survival. Although I'd like to say I've had the time to study all the most important aspects of these proposed changes, I have not, yet, done study comprehensive enough to satisfy me, but then how many have? ~ and thus that won't keep me from saying, emphatically, that whereas certain provisions that address the infrastructure of voting ( as there always will be a more or less complex infrastructure, state by state, however simpler we make the acts of casting and counting ballots themselves ) may be worth keeping, the machines are ever-so-dramatically NOT worth keeping. We need to establish a consistent position about the actual means of voting, and machines have no part in those. They are de facto conveyances for fraud, and at a "nuclear" level. Other countries have seen the light about machines, and I suspect the American public is becoming much more capable of now doing so, with each and every passing day ( and thanks to lots of help from some of us !! ). We need to press that advantage and without looking back ~~ and howsoever many other good things might be a part of howsoever many other pieces of legislation ~~ this one cancer, this one most deadly cancer, MUST be excised as quickly as possible and permanently. Recycle them all, or just melt them. No loss. ( Or, perhaps a good "punitive damage" for those who manufactured them in the first place. ) There is simply no way ever to make peace with this Trojan Horse at our gates, let alone continue to give it free entry in and out of our society, in fact, any of our global societies. We need once and for all to abolish all vote-counting and tabulating and vote-casting machines, in all their sordid combinations, and world-wide. I wouldn't even like to see adding machines, since "Nature's God" ~~as Jefferson put it~~ has given us fingers and toes and eyes, enough. We have what we need, two hundred years ago and well before, and that's that. Whatever anyone else wants to do with the upcoming legislation, that's on them. But the call of Conscience is awfully clear to mine, at least, and I hear it giving a constant "two thumbs down" to any vote-counting machinery of any kind. In fact, that's the same tune I've been humming ( and a pretty loud hum, in cyberspace at least ) ever since I got in this fight, well before many another's, and that much could never change. Ever. And I hope that will be the case for an ever growing number of citizens, as they come to a full understanding of that particular issue, and the grave ongoing threats involved across the board. Electronic voting threatens not only all our democracies, as the most clear and present of any dangers we face to date, but every aspect of our lives and survival. We need to press this case as fervently as ever, and now more so. If our representatives pretend not to hear that voice of the People's conscience, what else is new? If we keep this cause before us, they will eventually be forced to hear it, like it or not, as is always the case in popular movements that are diligent and committed enough. But we mustn't let them sell us a bundle of goods yet again !! We need to tell them "no," and again, and then ask them, "What part of NO don't you understand?" since they are very challenged that way.

Authors Website: http://www.nativeintelligenceagency.blogspot.com

Authors Bio:

John Ervin is a freelance writer involved for the past ten years with investigations of electronic voting fraud and its derivatives, and on occasion several of the other highly organized corporatic crimes. He has been the radio guest of Jim Hogue at www.wgdr.org, Goddard College in Vermont (one of Pacifica Radio's 200 affiliates).

[While a longtime member of the American Federation of Musicians (local 4) he has performed as a concert pianist. He has also served as member of the Cleveland Orchestra's choruses, in live performances at Severance Hall and Blossom Music Festival, as well as those recorded in group performances for EMI in England, and broadcasts for the BBC, and WCLV in Cleveland, some highlighted by North American terrestrial radio transmissions, and the whole distributed world-wide on the internet by WCLV. The chorale CD in Great Britain for EMI was nominated for a Grammy.]

During and after the Bush v. Gore fiasco, he became by degrees an accidental journalist as he began to study in greater depth the activities and rise of America's secret government, much of its CIA founding years with intersticed and substantive roots in Nazism, and the heavy-handed influence of the American intelligence communities in disrupting or re-directing many of our democratic processes and institutions. This research has served as a resilient motivation to share historical facts and questions surrounding the hidden and deeper politics that contribute to the long-standing and ongoing deformation of our society as a whole, and also in tragic personal accounts of many.

For over ten years Ervin has been an advocate for the heightened and more coordinated alliance of independent media throughout the world ~low power radio broadcasters, community radio programmers and volunteers, independent film makers, indy musicians and journalists, et al.~ to form and maintain a clearing-house of information that in assessment of intel risks bears upon the security of communities world-wide, a global "neighborhood watch", a sure defense against our common antagonist: top-down, privatized governmental intelligence, chief among them: American.

Ervin continues to lobby for the establishment of a parallel "intelligence analysis in exile" ~ one that can become a far more faithful mirror of what CIA was originally intended to be: strictly a non-operational intelligence-gatherer. But evolved by us as a grass-roots creation and built for the safety of all our peoples.