Grover "Drown Govt in Bathtub" Norquist Makes Revealing Comments on Elections

Land Shark

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Sat Nov-10-07 07:36 PM
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Grover "Drown Govt in Bathtub" Norquist Makes Revealing Comments on Elections

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_paul_leh_071110_opednews_exclusive_3b_.htm (more than four paragraphs, but less than half, reprinted here with permission of author -- the DU poster) PLEASE USE THE LINK TO SEE ORIGINAL, FULL TEXT

Influential conservative activist and lobbyist Grover Norquist appeared Friday in Washington D.C. at the elections reform conference called "ClaimDemocracy" as part of a panel of four guests speaking about the areas of elections where the left, right, and center may be able to find common ground. www.claimdemocracy.org {snip}

For his part, Norquist expounded for several minutes primarily about transparency in elections as something diverging political viewpoints could agree on. {snip}

In a famous quip from a few years ago, Norquist did not find too much common ground with Democrats and Independents when he unilaterally announced that "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

{snip} I expected Norquist to be completely on top of the implications of the government determining 100% of its own power and taxing authority in secret vote counting computerized systems. {snip}

OPEDNEWS: Mr. Norquist, do you support global transparency throughout all aspects of the elections system, including but not limited to transparent campaign finance, transparent vote counting, and so on?

NORQUIST: "Uh, what do you mean?"

OPEDNEWS: Well, whatever portions of the elections systems are not transparent, that's where the corrupting forces in elections will concentrate their efforts, if there are any, kind of like a burglar when robbing a house always moves to the unlocked window or unlocked door, ignoring the "security" procedures in place on the locked windows or doors.

NORQUIST: "We should be able to watch the vote counts. I've been involved with watching vote counts before... "

OPEDNEWS: (tapping on a laptop) But the votes these days are counted using invisible electrons on hard drives.

NORQUIST: "I never thought about that before." <..> "It needs to be transparent -- however they do that...."

Given Norquist's stated distrust of the taxing authority of the government and his comments in favor of transparency, his instincts were clearly headed in the right direction: a preference for visually observable vote counts that is broadly consistent with norms of democracy. That preference was echoed by an August 2006 Zogby poll that this author helped pay for (together with Michael Collins of electionfraudnews.com and Nancy Tobi of democracyfornewhampshire.com) that found that up to 92% of the American public preferred an observable vote count to proprietary corporate vote count. However, it is quite surprising that the principles of global transparency in elections is something Norquist never really thought about much before.

In light of this exclusive short interview by opednews, perhaps one factor probably influencing Norquist's preference for "small government" is his need to have ideas like "government" presented in small, manageable packages so he can torture and kill them in a bathtub somewhere. Norquist, lecturing election advocates and experts from all over the country yet not being familiar with the idea that the entire election system has to be transparent before transparency can really work well, proved that his knowledge of transparency in elections was, er, shallow.

To see all the details on HOW Norquist embarrassed himself, please see the original article and (brief) exclusive interview at http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_paul_leh_071110_opednews_exclusive_3b_.htm