|
electronic voting boondoggle was passed amidst massive, lavish lobbying by RIGHTWING, BUSHITE e-voting corporations (the major beneficiaries--Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia), to PREVENT any controls on the technology which CLEARLY was not only untested, it was private, secret and absolutely wrong! "TRADE SECRET" code in our vote counting system? No audit trail? In a third of the system, no recount capability AT ALL? No requirement for it?
This is just plain nuts. It is OBVIOUSLY nuts. It's a no brainer. HAVA put in place a highly insecure and insider riggable, INHERENTLY fraudulent vote counting system, all over the country. This is NOT a matter of Republican corruption and subversion. The provisions of the bill, on its face, are fraudulent. The vote counts now are fraudulent--unprovable, unverifiable, non-transparent--almost everywhere in the country. And you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that HAVA **took away** our right to vote, and GAVE IT TO these RIGHTWING corporations. If you can't SEE your vote counted, it is not a vote. It is a wish. It is a hope. It is a shot in the dark. You might as well be choosing to buy a microwave oven and hoping it doesn't kill you; or buying corn chips and hoping they don't contain genetically modified corn, cuz it's NOT LABELED!
Corporatized vote 'counting.' You pays yer money, you takes yer chances. Buyers beware. Remember W.C. Fields' mockery of U.S. robber baron businesses?--"Never give a sucker an even break!"
They don't like to tell you what crap they're putting in your food, your walls, your cars or your air, and they will go to any lengths to prevent you from finding out, because why? Because they are thieves and liars for maximized profit. And they got tired of buying our politicians, and decided just to APPOINT them, from the get-go, with DIRECT "trade secret" control over election outcomes, with no audit trail.
Democrats who pushed this, and bought into it--and I'm talking virtually the entire leadership of the Democratic Party--are as corrupt as the Republicans. That they didn't cry foul on this, the most egregious assault on our democracy since Pearl Harbor, tells us WHO THEY ARE. They are people who no longer believe in democracy. They are Corporatists. And this doesn't just mean favoring corporations--giving them tax breaks, etc. This means letting them RUN THE COUNTRY, write the laws, privatize every goddamned thing including the U.S. military, and determine election outcomes with "TRADE SECRET" code.
That's what we're up against here. The end of "The Commons." The PRIVATIZATION of our democracy, to be looted by fatcat billionaire CEOs, with our "political representatives" as their lapdogs.
That's what 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting tells me. Our Democratic Party leaders are no longer with us. And this is a very hard reality to face, no question about it.
When our good Secretary of State in California, Kevin Shelley, went after Diebold in 2004--decertified the worst of their election theft machines, and sued their asses, and demanded to see their "trade secret" code--do you know who took him down--who 'swift-boated' him out of office, on entirely bogus corruption charges? It was the state DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERSHIP! The Republicans barely had to lift a finger. They are, in any case, outnumbered two to one in the state legislature. It was the DEMOCRATS! And, frankly, I have never seen anything so ugly and corrupt in my life, in California politics.
And so, I asked myself: WHY would DEMOCRATS want Diebold--a corporation with direct ties to the Bush Junta--'counting' all our votes with 'TRADE SECRET' code, in voting machines with NO PAPER TRAIL?
Why, indeed?
You MIGHT say that, THEORETICALLY, a privatized, corporate-run, secretly coded vote counting system COULD BE transparent--even if it violates the most basic condition of democracy (vote counting that everyone can see and understand)--but HAVA CONTAINED NO SUCH CONTROLS. NO "paper trail" required. Secret, INDUSTRY "testing" of the machines. A completely dysfunctional, Bush-appointed Election Assistance Commission. And lobbying corruption of state/local election officials from the one end of the country to the other, with no controls on lobbying either.
No controls AT ALL, no transparency AT ALL--on our most fundamental right: our right to vote.
I'm willing to grant that our Democratic Party leaders sometimes have mixed motives, and that some are afraid--for various reasons--and that some are well-intentioned but disempowered. In this, they are different from Bushites, who are pretty uniformly corrupt dirtbags and fascists. But the choices that these "mixed bag" Democratic leaders see for themselves, and for us, are so tainted with corporatism that they are not really "choices"--unless you consider limp, lifeless white bread vs. limp, lifeless wheat bread, to be a "choice." That's your "optiscan" voting machine (which has a "paper trail"), with, say, a 1% (completely inadequate) audit, combined with a central tabulator run on 'TRADE SECRET' code, vs. your "touchscreen" (no "paper trail"), with no audit at all possible, combined with a central tabulator run on 'TRADE SECRET' code. What kind of choice is that? That's a 'Democratic' Corporatist "choice." Limp, lifeless wheat bread.
The choice of REAL bread is not permitted. The choice of fully transparent, fully verifiable, open, aboveboard vote counting in the PUBLIC venue is NOT permitted.
That's what our Democratic Party leadership did to us--with Christopher Dodd (Bilderberg Group attendee) as the point man.
HAVA is the most corrupt piece of legislation ever passed by a Congress. It was traitorous. It effectively ENDED our democracy, but for the democracy that lives on in our hearts.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
