by Phil Tajitsu Nash What concerns me most about the election held last Tuesday is that it is being treated like a normal event, like everything is groovy and now we can get on with the rest of our lives. Have we all entered some kind of bizarro universe? Commentators are talking about red states, blue states, morality voters, and other issues, when the main topic we should be discussing is how badly the campaign process functioned and how hard we should be working to bring our 18th Century democracy into the 21st Century.
For example, consider these ten questions:
1. What would you say if your bank manager told you that you really didn’t need a receipt for your bank transactions and that you should trust him to make sure that your accounts were in order? By delaying the purchase of optical scanner voting machines with auditable paper trails, the Congressional Republicans have left thousands of Americans with no way to conduct a recount in their districts. Reports of machine malfunctions and seriously inaccurate vote tabulations are coming to light, and should be pursued vigorously, but the bigger non-partisan issue is this: why are we allowing corporate voting machine companies to privately own the tools of democracy? Why are companies such as Diebold, owned by mega-fundraisers for the GOP, allowed to keep the codes and procedures for vote tabulations secret even from those jurisdictions that purchase their machines? And why can’t they provide a paper trail when they do so for millions of bank transactions every year? (www.blackboxvoting.org and www.democraticunderground.com)
2. Why do we allow any group of voters to be intimidated into not voting? Where is the non-partisan outrage now that the partisan fury has subsided? Can we get rid of archaic state laws used to challenge voters, and pass a Constitutional right to Vote – something not presently embodied in our nation’s founding document? (www.ourvote.com)
3. Why do we allow states to be categorized as Blue or Red when up to 49% of the voters in some of those states are not followers of the victorious party? Isn’t it time we had some form of proportional representation in this country so that we can be like most of the other industrialized democracies of the world? (www.fairvote.org)
<snip, more, well worth the read>
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-22.htmThe system is rigged. No, I don't mean black box voting, however I do have my doubts. No, I mean our entire political system. It is rigged to prohibit the "average" citizen from really participating. The system is rigged to ensure that the rich and the powerful hold public office, and they prefer their club to be private. Now is the time for change. This should be our issue, the reform of the electoral system.
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