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'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY vote counting, in highly insecure and inside hackable voting machines, with the secret code owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, is KILLING our democracy. It is blockading reform. It is responsible not only for keeping Bush/Cheney in power, but for the complete non-responsiveness of our so-called 'Democratic' Congress to the will of SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people who oppose the Iraq War and want it ended. That is a staggering majority. And it was to defeat that majority of peace-minded, justice-minded Americans--which has grown from 56% opposition to the war just before it started, to 70% today--that "trade secret" vote counting was devised. The bill that fast-tracked this non-transparent vote counting system all over the country was passed in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution, and is closely related to it. The IWR guaranteed unjust war and a field day for war profiteers. And the so-called "Help America Vote Act" provided the means to shove the war and its profiteers down the throats of the American people.
"Trade secret" vote counting has other uses as well--to keep us from achieving universal health care, to keep us from getting any of our money back from the thieves who have stolen billions and billions of dollars from our treasury, to prevent us from restoring the progressive tax, to protect corporate welfare, to protect all the enormous gains for the rich and the corporate under Bush, to consolidate presidential tyranny--torture, spying, detention without trial, no-fly lists, secret military budgets, the president as a rule unto himself--and to continue our downward spiral into the ignominious status of slave labor for our corporate masters and cannon fodder for corporate resource wars. To get a military Draft; to put chips in our arms so they always know where we are. You get the picture. With "trade secret" vote counting, the fascist/corporate powers can do ANYTHING--and they pretty much ARE doing anything right now.
I REALLY like your list. Taking away corporate personhood is high on my list as well. I would go further and start pulling corporate charters, dismantling them and seizing their assets for the common good, and I would start with every war profiteering corporate news monopoly in the country.
But we cannot get there--to real reform--without restoring the bottom line of democratic change: transparent vote counting; vote counting that everyone can see and understand.
It's not going to come as a gift from a progressive regime in Washington DC. We cannot elect a progressive regime without transparent elections. We have to take back our right to vote at the state/local level, where ordinary people still have some influence, and we have to act before the DC political establishment finally takes that power away from states and localities (--which, by God, is just what these so-called Democrats in Congress tried to do with the election reform issue this term; cementing electronic voting into the law and giving the power over the "trade secret" code to the President of the United States!).
"Trade secret" vote counting is the ultimate in corporate personhood. One of the worst of these election theft corporations--ES&S--recently argued in a Florida court that their "right" to profit from our elections TRUMPS the voters' right to know how their votes were counted. The case was FL-13, the 2006 Congressional election in which ES&S machines 'disappeared' 18,000 votes for Congress in Democratic areas, in an election that was "won" by the Bushite (naturally!) by only 350 some votes. The lawyers for the Democrat (Christine Jennings) took the matter to court, asked to review ES&S's "trade secret" code--to try to figure out what happened to those 18,000 votes--and ES&S REFUSED, and the judge agreed with ES&S! And Congress has done nothing about this. NOTHING!
So, guess what? If you are an election theft corporation, you have more rights than anybody. You have more rights than the voters. You have the election all to yourself! You can count the votes any damn way you please--or don't count them--and nobody gets to see what you're doing! Now THAT'S "personhood"!
And tyranny. And a complete blockade to reform. It's not the only thing wrong with our election system, but it is the killer.
Transparent vote counting transcends all other issues, and must come first, BEFORE anything else is possible.
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