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They've got Diane Feinstein in charge of the Senate committee on elections. This is ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ad, folks! Really, really bad! They're going to STRENGTHEN and make permanent the so-called Election Assistance Commission, which has already done so much damage to our election system, and CENTRALIZE all power over elections, by giving ONLY THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH (the President and his/her cronies) access to escrowed SECRET PROGRAMMING CODE by which all votes, everywhere in the nation, will be tabulated (as most of them already are). Not your local election official. Not your secretary of state. Not YOU! Only the President and whoever he/she appoints to the EAC will have access to the SECRET CODE!
By strengthening the EAC and making it permanent, they will thus be RE-ENFORCING the conversion to NON-TRANSPARENT electronic voting machines and central tabulators, run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations. The heads of these corporations should be IN JAIL, not made richer! They have stolen one presidential election, and numerous Congressional elections, and now there is evidence they prevented a landslide Democratic vote 12 days ago.
This system CANNOT BE FIXED. This system--engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney--MUST BE THROWN OUT.
No more SECRET CODE!
So, what are we going to do when it's rammed down our throats by Senator Diane "You too can learn to love the Corporate Rulers" Feinstein.
I think we will have a very limited window of opportunity to defy this Corporate coup at the local level. And here's how we do it: This last election there was a huge increase in the Absentee Ballot vote, clearly indicating large-scale voter distrust of the machines, and the voters' attempt to get around the rigged electronics. 50% of the California vote was by Absentee Ballot--an enormous increase--and it was big all over. We need to organize this constituency to pressure local/state election officials to, a) HAND-COUNT the Absentee Ballot votes, and b) POST the results BEFORE any electronics are used. We will thus create a paper ballot system BY DEFAULT. As news of transparent vote counting spreads from the 30 states where Absentee Ballot voting is now permitted, other states' voters will demand Absentee Ballots, hand counting, and immediate posting. And the thing will snowball. Also, soon the optiscan voters will also demand that THEIR ballots be hand-counted and the results posted immediately.
This backdoor strategy to transparent vote counting has the advantage of circumventing all the corruption in the electronic voting contracts that has made election reform so difficult. The election officials who have purchased this crappy machinery can keep their machines, for the time being, but with a 100% handcount and immediate posting of the results, the election fraud capability in the electronic programming is disabled.
The election reform movement has NO STRATEGY. It has been awesome at informing the public, but it has not proposed a practical, on the ground plan to achieve the goal of transparent vote counting. THIS is a strategy! And we don't have much time.
The Corporate Rulers are about to solidify their control over all election results. And it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following this issue that the final death blow to our democracy is going to inflicted by the Corporate Democrats.
Read the rest of Landshark's analysis of HR 550--the bill that is going to sanctify election theft and make it a permanent condition of our election system. It does this with a death by small cuts. An inadequate audit (2%) becomes the standard. What to audit is chosen by the same riggable electronics that can choose presidents and senators in defiance of the will of the people. "Trade secret" code is not banned--it is escrowed. A "paper trail" is required but what good is that in a SECRET vote counting system without a decent audit--and with recounts being so expensive, difficult and rare? And, worst of all, it confirms ELECTRONIC VOTING WITH TRADE SECRET CODE, and corporate control of vote counting, as the standard for our elections.
HR 550 will improve some very bad situations--states with no paper trail at all, states with no audit at all. But do we use the worst cases to determine what the best should be?
With regard to our right to vote, there is only one best--and that is TOTAL TRANSPARENCY.
HR 550 is an unacceptable compromise of our right to vote! And in Diane Feinstein's hands, it could be made even worse than it already is.
I think we MUST have a local/state strategy, to take advantage of the huge Absentee Ballot movement among voters, while state and local jurisdictions still have the choice of transparent vote counting.
There is nothing we can do about HR 550. It's a done deal. And THAT, my friends, tells you something about just how transparent these midterm elections were. The views of 50% of the voters in California about these riggable machines, and of millions of other voters across the country, don't count. We're going to get electronic voting shoved down our throats because our voices still don't count in Washington DC.
So--as some of us knew all along--if we want transparent vote counting, we, the people, will have to see to it ourselves.
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