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them raising their own salaries and giving themselves full medical benefits. But worse.
Okay, I DO get your point. And I'm as worried about secret vote counting by Congressional fiat as you are--especially with Diane ("You too can learn to love the Corporate Rulers") Feinstein heading the Senate committee on elections--and with what appears to be the passable bill, HR 550--in the House anyway--rewarding these criminal corporations with MORE multi-million dollar contracts, now for printers, now for upgrades, now for replacing all those bad touchscreens, now for this, now for that. And with its several loopholes big enough to drive more stolen elections through.
I DO get it.
But what do you say to those of us who are rather deeply attached to the Voting Rights Act of 1965--that things are so bad that federal intervention is needed? We have a third of the country voting with no paper trail at all--and many states with no audit at all?
I'm with you--I HATE having a gravely compromised STANDARD being voted into law--when they SHOULD BE repealing HAVA altogether, and burning these corporate logos in effigy on the capitol steps!
And I have a plan myself--a strategy--for achieving transparent vote counting at the LOCAL/STATE level--involving mobilizing the clout of that huge group of voters who voted by Absentee Ballot this time, to start creating a paper ballot system BY DEFAULT, by getting the AB votes handcounted and the results posted BEFORE any electronics are used--which I think will snowball. This strategy also avoids a headon collision with the vast corruption among election officials and legislators, wrought by the HAVA billions--the chief obstacle to reform, in my opinion. They can keep their crapass new machines, for the time being--and use them merely to double-check the handcount, and for storage/reporting of data. But, if we can get the AB and other paper ballots counted, and then the optiscan voters want their ballots counted, too, etc. then the corporate lock on the vote totals will be broken.
However, this strategy may be slow, and has many pitfalls--and, currently, only 30 states permit AB voting. So, LS, what to do? What do you say, for instance, about the states with paperless voting and/or no audit at all? They are in critical condition.
What about a two-pronged strategy? Work to amend HR 550, as well as it can be amended by a Congress elected by Diebold/ES&S (for all its Democratic coloration), to get some bottom-line relief for the really bad state situations, AND work from the bottom to make the machines obsolete (by everybody voting by AB and demanding handcounts/immediate posting of results)?
We have to figure that a really good bill cannot happen in this Congress. Even it it happens in the House--a stretch--the Senate will gut it or kill it. That's a fair prognosis. It's possible that the Corporate Rulers will have squeezed us all so dry by the end of the Bush Junta that they won't bother with continuing to fix our elections. So we might be surprised. But, how things look now, we're going to have Congress giving lots more money to these corporations; and we'll probably end up still with secret code at least in the central tabulators, but with enough of an audit trail that we might be able to catch them some of the time, if we work really hard at it.
Why fight it--except to get it amended, if possible (say, with a stiffer audit), and to build support for real reform?
I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Imagine a world in spring '08 with no HR 550 (and nothing better in its place). Would we be better off with no HR 550 (as written)? Is it possible that a grass roots AB strategy could work by that time? Is it possible to get HR 550 amended--and through the Senate--in a way that WOULD considerably improve transparency?
For instance, leave HR 550 exactly as it is, except for, say, a 50% audit requirement. (I would like 100%, but 50% would be pretty damned good. These machines should never, never, NEVER have been put in place WITHOUT a 100% audit--at least the first time around, in a national election! It's nuts that they were!)
Leave the contracts in place. Don't threaten the HAVA billions. Just AUDIT it. (And the People will take it from there...).
???
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As for Congress setting the rules for their own elections--and opting for "trade secret," proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations--it's in the mind-boggling category. But that's what these bastards did in 2002. Now they say they're going to patch it up and fix all the boo-boo's and kiss our wittle knees. Right.
But state legislators did the same--letting these bad actor corporations re-write our election laws. I would like to reverse this picture, and invest local boards of elections with the SOLE power to choose voting systems. I believe in the People. The closer to the People, the better. We can get on boards of elections--people who live right down the street from us. Except for situations like we had in the 1950s-1960s, where local boards/states were just outright denying voting rights to blacks, maybe the Feds ought to butt out.
But we don't have that now. We have elected (or should I say (s)elected?) LEGISLATORS writing the laws. When they write really, really bad election laws--like they did in this disaster--it smells to high heaven. But what would you suggest? If the HAVA billions were not a factor, we could get some real simple legislation out of Congress (like handcount every federal election vote, in a certain size precinct, and post the results in that precinct--and whatever else you do is local business). It would still be Congress critters setting the rules for their own elections, but the rules would be benign.
But we DO have HAVA billions stinking up the works. What do we do in THIS situation?
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