US democracy: its achilles heal and single point of failure

[info being]

Any grade-schooler can tell you about the brilliant system of checks-and-balances established by the founders of the United States. Ours is a brilliant system whereby the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial systems are kept separate and independent. Add to that another supposedly independent force -- the media -- and what we you have is a strong, sustainable system that is resistant to authoritarian, non-democratic rule.

What our Founders failed to anticipate is that all of that could be undermined through a single point of failure: the inability for the public to verify election results. Instead, we are supposed to trust the likes of Diebold, a pro-Bush Corporation which makes electronic voting machines that do not produce a verifiable paper trail. In other words, a small group of insiders have the obvious means to tamper with the machines they made, and rig the election results. If the vote can be rigged, then a band of thugs (the NeoConservative Bush Administration) can easily take over the Presidency, Congress, and finish us off by appointing like-minded judges. And the brilliance of this plan is that the people won’t even know what hit them.

In the aftermath of the Nov. 2nd election, it is becoming more apparent by the hour that massive vote fraud took place. Years of hard work and millions of dollars went down the drain within just a few hours on election night. We sat helpless, completely dependent upon the mainstream media's report of the secret, hidden electronic tallies. Evidence supporting the likelihood of vote fraud is piling up around the web. And all the while, the powers-that-be are busy doing everything they can to make sure that we citizens aren't allowed access to the data that is the very foundation of our supposed democracy.

Regardless of what can be proven, as long as we have unverifiable voting machines, we no longer have democracy in the USA. The truth is, we don't know who won on November 2nd, 2004...and as long as these machines are in place, we never will know who actually wins any election. And yet rather than being offered a solution, we are asked to trust that which we know we cannot: unaccountable, corrupt politicians and self-interested corporations.

[Robroy]

1. Exactly

Thanks for laying it out so clearly. If my vote cannot be verified then what's the fucking point in voting! I'm not so young and idealistic as I once was. Can you believe I used to think that honesty and truthfulness would always win out over greed and lies. That good always trumps evil. It just never occurred to me that the love of power is stronger than the power of love. It's past time to open our eyes and take this fight to the streets.

[info being]

5. I don't know about the streets.

We're likely to be crushed like bugs in the street while the busy people walk right on by.

[bemildred]

2. US is not a democracy.

In a democracy, honest elections are held, the votes counted,
and the results determine who takes office.

[info being]

6. That's the shorter way of saying it.

RIP USA.

[bemildred]

8. In the interest of clarity:

The US has had a rigged election system and a corrupt and collusive
government for quite a long time. What is new here is that there is some
new technology being employed - the unconsidered fascination with
computers that we have - and it is not working out as planned. My
own suspicion is that, like the internet, it's going to bite our
ruler in the ass, eventually. The present system is byzantine for
a reason, it's easy to fix when you need to, and as long as nobody
goes to that well too often, the public still, in their ignorance,
think it's honest. The computerization of it may well, eventually,
lead to a uniform and honest system that will be much harder to fix
and prompt in it's judgements.

[sweetheart]

3. The root failures as well.

The newtonian system of checks and balances was designed for a time
when our worldview was distinclty newtonian. We have moved on to
a world of relativistic and quantum models that newtonian physics
is accepted only as an early model of mechanics, and a step towards
more modern understandings.

However, the constitution has not moved on, but has rather been
sideswiped by financial and electronic media, 2 forces that the
original newtonian designers did not include, and these forces have
totally corrupted the original system. The voting problems you
mention would not be an issue if these 2 fundamental forces were
properly harnessed. However, expecting a rule-based system innovated
in the past to adapt for new social systems, is simply unrealistic
and the american public has been away from its collective desk,
letting rats chew away at the separation of powers.

Voting systems are an obvious outgrowth of both forces. They are
a system of financial media first, in so much as the companies that
make these systems are supported and owned by a legislated system
of finance underwritten by an unconstitutional federal reserve and
tax collection system. Though corporations should be subservient
to the citizen per the original intent of the constitution, this has
been perverted by the failure of the rules to adapt to changing
times, that the corporation is above the law, and its CEO can
promise to deliver an election to *. (diabold)

As well, why arn't the media doing their job exposing bad governance
and getting the truth out to the public. Again, a failure of
financial ownership has created a system of collusion where media
are not empowered to do their job, rather to parrot the party line,
AND media plurality has been overlooked in regulation that media
only represent certain viewpoints, and not a full spectrum.

The single point of failure is corporate personhood.

A secondary point of failure is the federal reserve act.

Both of these are gross revisions of the framer's constitution that
underwrite the "single point of faiure" of bad vote counting you
mention.

[info being]

4. Wow, very interesting response

I don't know anything about newtonian world view, but it sounds like something I should look into.

[sweetheart]

7. it just illustrates a point

At the time when the constitution was framed, newtonian mechanics
was the rage and a "paper/hammer/scissors" checkpoint seemed an
improvement over the house of lords/house of commons/monarch model
of the colonizer.

Information theory has different models, chaos theory and all that,
where one little event can ripple across a system in a nonliear way,
like a blowjob and a blue dress rippled in to a mass murder and
invasion of iraq. Likely had the former not happened, the latter
would not have come about.

Media theory derives more from these complex systems than from the
simple mechanics, and trust has been misplaced that the original
checkpoints have held sway even though information theory has
replaced them. Clinton used pure media-populism, instead of
formal checkpoint mechanisms, as he reached outside the system to
manipulated it for what he thought was his favour... and got burned
by a linda trip tape recorder recording a confidential telephone
call in a private living room. That single point, lead to an
impeachment, which lead to a gore/clinton split in campaigning and
a failure to secure the executive.... all because of the nonlinearity
of electronic media.

Electronic voting systems are similarly nonlinear, and subject to the
rules of the latter paradigm, rather than the mechanical systems of
the lever voting that so securely ran elections for so long.

The propaganda still sells the checkpoint theory, along with all the
high school civics books.... but it is outmoded, and for all
practical purposes, the constitution is no longer in force. The
bill of rights has been stripped and superceded without checkpoint,
the president has commiited high crimes in going to war on lies
(no checkpoint). People are held in a concentration camp, where
some have been murdered by police investigators outside of the law,
which is grossly beyond checkpoint. Were the constitutoin in force,
bush would have been impeached years ago. Instead, we have a myth
that it is in force, and a reality of might makes right, and a
neo-monarchy.

I don't think the framers expected it to last more than 50 years,
and if told in their coffins that it has lasted over 200, they would
surely have a good laugh.