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big democracy movement that is occurring there) ban the promulgation of opinion polls (also TV/radio ads, to prevent hit piece ads) in the final weeks before the election.
For instance, the polls we have been reading here showing increasing support for the new Ecuadoran Constitution among the nation's voters, over the last few weeks, were banned in Ecuador. (It won by nearly 70% of the vote, and contains a provision--a first in the world--granting legal status to Mother Nature.) The ban on late opinion poll info protects voters against false polls (which Mark Penn's firm was trying to do in Venezuela), and is a sort of "anti-mob mentality" measure, whereby if someone or something is winning in the pre-election polls, it can suppress the other side's votes, with voters giving up and staying home, or switching votes just because everybody else is voting that way--and most South American countries are now pushing maximum citizen participation. They don't want to discourage anyone from voting.
South America has a lot better election rules than we do, in many respects. The most spectacular difference that I have found is in Venezuela. Venezuela uses electronic voting, but it is a publicly owned, OPEN SOURCE code system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they additionally handcount a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. Here, we have 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, in systems all over the country, owned and controlled by Bushwhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. In half the systems, there is no ballot to count, so no audit or recount is even possible. You have to trust the Bushwhack corp to tell you who won. The other half has a paper ballot backup, but they don't count 99% of the ballots (--a 1% audit is totally inadequate in a 'TRADE SECRET' code system; the minimum to detect fraud is 10%, according to some experts).
The details of Venezuela's voting system helped me to realize how INSANE our system is, and how INSANE it was that it was fast-tracked all over the country with virtually no audit/recount controls, during the 2002 to 2004 period, and it prompted me to ask, why? How could this happen? How could our Democratic Party leaders have permitted this to happen?
My answers: 1) to keep the Forever War going; 2) to give away a bottomless cup of Fool's Gold to the richest people in America (and other countries), starting with $700 BILLION that we don't have--in a last minute, panic-driven, fast-tracked bill, one month before elections; and 3) everything else that's happened, that Bush/Cheney and our...ahem...Democratic Congress are responsible for.
Really, that's what I think. A vote counting system designed of, by and for Corpo/fascists, to implement the final looting.
(Noteworthy: Christopher Dodd was the point person for the 'Democrats' on ramming through e-voting with no audit/recount controls, during the same month as the Iraq War Resolution, and is also a major player in this final looting of the American people, unto the 7th generation.)
There is hardly a member of Congress who can prove that he or she was actually elected. And I'm beginning to think that almost NONE of them were.
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