Is anyone attending the DNC meeting in September?

I don't know all the details, since I'm not a member of the DNC...but I remember someone at DU saying that the DNC's next meeting will be in September (however, I don't know the exact date?)

First, does anyone here know about the agenda for the meeting, and where/when it will be held?

Secondly, who thinks that we should send a loud and clear message to the DNC, for this next time when they're all together talking business and strategy, on a key issue that it seems the Democratic Party has FAILED to discuss publicly or in front of the media:

ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES (particularly DIEBOLD)

Is there SOMETHING we could do to get the DNC's clear attention in time for its next September meeting...a national petition drive, intense lobbying of DNC members (although I don't have a list of names or anything)...SOMETHING so that this issue doesn't fall completely off the radar before 2006 comes rolling around?

One of the mantras I hear repeated most often here is FIX THE VOTING MACHINES...yet, no one here really bothers to suggest HOW we should actually go about trying to get them fixed in time for 2006.

So I ask, again, wouldn't it make sense to send a mass appeal to the DNC from the grassroots loud enough that they CAN'T ignore it? Surely, Howard Dean would take it seriously if it came from a collective voice of people in the trenches?

Again, how can we get this accomplished?

- petition drive
- collaborative letter-writing, emailing, phone calling to DNC delegates on a state-by-state basis
- a "fair elections" website to be utilized nationally
- collecting public pledges from candidates to confront the issue

I'm just brainstorming here, but someone please help us out with this, because I don't personally have any contacts high up in the DNC whom I can talk to about this.

Why is it that people on DemocraticUnderground TALK a good game about how the voting machines need to be fixed, but never actually propose any strategic solutions toward actually fixing them?

Around the 8th or 9th.

It is from an article by Broder, and I just saved the snip.

"When I interviewed Dean recently, he readily acknowledged that "people think they know what the Republicans stand for, and they can't say that about the Democrats." But he said he has his staff collecting ideas from Democratic officeholders, activists and contributors about the party's agenda, and he hopes at the DNC's September meeting in Phoenix to find agreement on "three or four broad things we all have in common," then use them in his speeches and on the Web. But when it comes to specific policies, he said, "we will follow the lead of Pelosi and Reid.""

But then since no one is willing to compromise on anything at all, I don't know how any of it will work.

One example, I think he will take the "gray" area on the abortion issue which is pushed by the Third Way, the DLC. It means working with groups which want to put restrictions on it. I think that is why the Democrats for Life, which refused to support Kerry, is getting a foot in the door, because of the Third Way Democrats.

Broder had a suggestion which is not half bad. But it would take a united party to pull it off:

"There's a better model available, should Dean have the courage to follow it. In the late 1950s, after Adlai Stevenson had lost to President Eisenhower for the second time, DNC Chairman Paul Butler created the Democratic Advisory Council as a policy voice for the party. Its membership included a number of governors, major figures from past Democratic administrations, party leaders and a few members of Congress willing to ignore the objections of the two Texans who then ran Congress, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom distrusted Butler's motives.

But while Johnson and Rayburn worked within the constraints of the existing division of power, just as Reid and Pelosi must do now, the Democratic Advisory Council began to lay out the long-term Democratic agenda. It could not be passed in that Congress, but it became the substance behind John Kennedy's "New Frontier" campaign slogan of 1960 and of the policy initiatives that fully blossomed in "the Great Society" legislation that Johnson sponsored as president."

Not sure how that would work but its an idea.

Maybe Howard Dean is trying to make the people of the party like the Democratic Advisory Council below. He speaks of putting together an agenda formed from local ideas.

From Broder's article:

"DNC Chairman Paul Butler created the Democratic Advisory Council as a policy voice for the party. Its membership included a number of governors, major figures from past Democratic administrations, party leaders and a few members of Congress."

So the question is:

How do we make one of those "three or four broad things" be about fixing rigged elections?