Reply #80: YES!!! Criminally accountable [View All]

[Eloriel]

That's another major issue -- if you look at some of the court cases regarding voting issues, there's one overwhelming factor that arises. We lose because judges don't hold our right to vote as important and sacred as WE do. That's because the LAWS don't support them holding our vote as important and sacred as WE do.

ALL our laws, in each and every state, need to be buffed up to a high sheen to make vote fraud, vote suppression, and all the other shenanigans (even vote administration INCOMPETENCE) something REALLY serious, with heavy duty penalties.

As an aside, there is NO excuse, for example, for the kind of, um, "incompetence" shown by GA SoS Cathy Cox (being charitable here, calling it incompetence). I have said often and will say it again, my fonest wish is to see her in prison stripes. That will probably never happen. Why? Because our laws don't support that. Unless she's found guilty of kickbacks or something similar(and that's unlikely, which is NOT the same as saying I don't think that happened), she'll get off scott-free.

(BTW, she also just announced, probably unofficially, her candidacy for Gov. in 2006 which we all knew was coming. I wonder if Diebold will continue to be grateful enough to her to help her win that too?)

We need to not only change laws to make it easier to convict people, possibly easier to prove, and even IMO to criminalize the kind of dereliction of duty exhibited by the Cathy Cox's of the world. That would require some very stiff standards for how SoS's are to behave, but IMO we can do that.

Hmmm. Hey, boredtodeath -- I just thought of something. Does Georgia have any recall law on the books? If there is, wouldn't it be cool to start a recall petition against Cathy Cox?

Okay, back to the subject. So a Constitutional Right to Vote Amendment would help, but in the meantime we need to work at the state level to change some of these laws.

I suggested to hedda-foil (of the National Ballot Integrity Project) about trying to develop some Model Legislation (at a slightly later date, once some of this craziness is all over with), and she loved the idea.

But one of the most important things is also taking a look at all the ways they gamed the system, and CAN game the system. That will be a fairly large undertaking, IMO, because we're still finding things out.