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paperless, unauditable, unrecountable voting machines, run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations.
This citizen effort--SAVE R Vote--cannot be praised too highly. This is what needs to happen all over the country, in every precinct, county and state election venue. People who are willing to take this kind of time for the sake of the rest of us, for the sake of our country, and for the sake of our children are truly the greatest patriots this country has ever known, and are right up there with Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson and other revolutionary heroes. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--more important than restoring transparent elections in the USA.
I hope the next steps are removal of Barbara Dunmore as Registrar of Voters, and a movement by voters to request and use paper ballots, to demand that those paper ballots be hand-counted in public view, and to have the results posted at the precinct level before any electronics are used.
And I hope that the BoS takes all of the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Commission, in the meantime, except the one that restricts observer access to the electronic tabulation area. That suggestion is quite incompatible with transparent vote counting, and no doubt is a spiteful sort of item, included by ROV Dunmore, or to please or mollify her, in response to her ridiculous allegations (also included in the report) of "harassment" of election personnel by public observers.
I also take exception to optiscans/w central tabulators--both still run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code--to replace the worst of these election theft machines, the DREs. Optiscans can also be manipulated, as has been proven time and again in other tests, and in actual elections. And the central tabulators are the most likely culprits in stolen elections. There is no place for secret code anywhere in our election system--let alone secret code owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations. What this optiscan-DRE switch means (--that is, substituting machines that have a ballot for paperless machines) is that the burden of discovering fraudulent totals and challenging the results still remains with the public, and not with the Registrar where the burden properly belongs. And many, many obstacles are placed in the way of discovering fraudulent totals, including lack of access to the central tabulators, inadequate auditing (automatic recount of a meager 1% of the vote), the high costs in time and money of any challenge, and the culture of secrecy that attends all of these corporate voting systems, which creates many opportunities for arrogant ROVs and private corporate personnel to fiddle the audits, insert and remove malicious code, and cover their tracks.
This matter is so serious that I have no hesitation in declaring that the fast-tracking of these election theft machines all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period, WAS the fascist coup. THIS is why we have 70% of the American people opposed to the Iraq War and wanting ended, and a President and a Congress which just ESCALATED the war and have no intention of ending it, or giving up this new US foothold in the Middle East. Our political establishment has built the Taj Mahal of US embassies in Baghdad and they mean to stay--to hell with the American people! Non-transparent vote counting--which was arranged by the Anthrax Congress in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution, and is closely related to it--is their method of shoving this heinous war and other fascist policy down our throats.
So this is what the Save R Vote folks in Riverside County are saving. Our democracy itself. Although going to optiscans is not enough transparency, I know how difficult it has been to get even this concession from our highly corrupt government--and especially in counties like Riverside which have led the way in e-voting corruption, with officials like Dunmore who have been especially vicious partisans of these Bushite e-voting corporations. We can never cease in our vigilance as citizens--that much we have surely learned--and we must keep pursuing the goal of 100% transparency in all vote counting--which I'm sure Save R Vote will be doing. What incredible heroes! I am awed. And I am so grateful for their work, as we all should be.
One final note: The DIFFICULTY of the work undertaken by Save R Vote activists should be an alarm bell to us all that something is very wrong. The people of this country should NOT have to devote 18 hours a day, and three years of their lives, to get us back to Square One: transparent elections, the most fundamental condition for democracy. This is an example of how the fascist/corporate rulers who have taken over our government and our public airwaves have frozen progress, by making us scramble to restore the most basic functions of government, and have pulled the debate on every issue so far to right that the simplest, most commonplace principles of democracy--like vote counting that everyone can see and understand, or the vice president's office being part of the Executive Branch, or government officials having to respond to Congressional subpoenas, or the wrongness of the President using a sentence commutation to cover up the crime of treason, or egregiously unjust, illegal war, or torturing prisoners--have to be endlessly argued about.
It shouldn't be this way. There is something very wrong with this picture. And at the heart of this wrongness lay a Stalinist vote counting system that was pushed into place under the radar of the American people. But it is only through the local efforts of dedicated people like the Riverside Save R Vote activists that this fascist junta is going to be dislodged, county by county, state by state, in a long and difficult struggle to restore democracy.
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