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than the present system, especially with regard to the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS we're paying RIGHTWING BUSHITE VOTING MACHINE CORPORATIONS, a factor that has so quickly and thoroughly corrupted our election system that our country may never recover. And also--as you say--depending on other rules and regs. For THIS country, I think that we must go back to hand-counted paper ballots, counted in PUBLIC VIEW with results posted at the precinct level--for several reasons, one of them being the putrid corruption of our system by electronics, another being our need to restore citizen activism and oversight of the entire voting process.
Venezuela divides the code into four parts. One part goes to leftwing parties, one part to the rightwing parties, one part to the election commission and the fourth part to somebody else (can't remember who--maybe the courts), and NOT ONE LINE OF CODE MAY BE ALTERED without the consent of ALL PARTIES.
And ON TOP OF THIS, they hand-count a whopping 55% of the votes as a check on machine fraud.
We have 'TRADE SECRET' code and handcount almost nothing--ZERO percent in many states, a miserable 1% in the best states.
Our system was fast-tracked all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period, for the purpose of fraud. It is an inherently fraudulent system. There is no other purpose for secret vote counting except fraud.
Venezuela's system, on the other hand, was created with TRANSPARENCY as the goal. It was hammered out with the active participation of the Carter Center, OAS election monitors, EU election monitors, local social movements and civic groups and the virulently anti-Chavez rightwing minority. Every aspect of the system has been openly presented and strongly debated.
Besides all this, the system has produced a government that is using the country's oil profits to bootstrap the poor--with education, medical care, community centers, land reform, grants and loans to small businesses and worker co-ops, and many other benefits, including encouragement of maximum citizen participation in government and politics through local community councils that have real control over federally funded projects. The government has produced a nearly 10% economic growth rate over the last five years, with the most growth in the PRIVATE sector (not including oil); illiteracy has been wiped out; poverty has been greatly reduced, and national and regional projects of great benefit to everyone have been initiated, such as the Bank of the South (replacing World Bank/IMF loan sharks), low cost housing for the poor, and the new Orinoco Bridge between Venezuela and Brazil. The proof is in the pudding, it seems to me. They have a scrupulously lawful, beneficial government. We have a cesspool of global corporate predator corruption, lawlessness, spying, torture, and mass slaughter of innocent people to steal their oil.
One other thing--the Chavez government recently proposed 69 amendments to the Venezuelan constitution for a vote of the people. And, while these proposals were probably sunk by the inclusion of an amendment insuring equal rights for gays and women (Venezuela is a Catholic country, with particularly rightwing bishops), and while the Bushites have poured millions of our tax dollars into rightwing minority groups in Venezuela, and while the Chavez government's loss of this referendum was very close (50.7% No vs. 49.3% Yes), it nevertheless establishes--for anyone who has succumbed to Bushite and corporate 'news' propaganda that Chavez is a "dictator"--that Venezuela's government has no illicit control over the vote counting. One of the amendments would have lifted the term limit on presidents, permitting the ever-popular Chavez (70% approval rating) to run for a third term. If ever the Chavistas had motive to fiddle the vote--if they had that power--it was this referendum. They lost. They accepted their loss gracefully and moved on. They would have been justified in challenging such a close vote. They did not. In Venezuela, everyone trusts their system to give them a reliable vote count!
When Penn & Schoen went down there--paid by Bush's USAID-NED--and produced a false poll that was to be used in conjunction with another rightwing coup attempt, in the Dec '06 presidential election--even the wingers didn't believe that Chavez had lost that election (he won with 60% of the vote!), and the rightwing candidate had to publicly disavow the plot.
I understand your reservations about false trust, and I share them. We need to clean house--and permit NO corporate fallback position by which they might worm their way back into our system. With open source, perhaps it could be by means of providing the machines, or the ballots--or by rightwing tech school (feeding tech moles to an 'open source' code system). I've seen enough of this touchscreen vs. optiscan bullshit to know that optiscans are the corporate fallback position. They expected touchscreens to be challenged. But optiscans with "trade secret' code are only slightly better. They still have secret control of election results. We have to get the corps entirely out of our system, and get the People back into it--and that means hand-counted paper ballots. In Venezuela, they've done their civic homework. The People are engaged. That is the key to everything. ANY method of vote counting can be fiddled. But, with an engaged population, you drastically reduce the chances that anyone would dare, and increase the chances that they would be caught.
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